Honestly, what’s the real incentive? Standards exist for reasons. Future proofing the code for how something is meant to appear for the idealistism of unambiguous, standardised readability is simply not a decent argument against making your site look good accross all browsers. Who wins from the trade off?

Formless, unrewarding ideologies — not users.

Peter,

While I agree that it is, to a certain extent, hypocritical to promote HTML validation and not CSS validation, I’d say that if you were to choose, HTML is widely more important.

Personally, I use zoom: 1; or height: 1%; in a separate file served only to IE, since there are scenarios where that is the only solution to meet hasLayout problems.

But sometimes validating CSS does really help. A friend of mine runs a Wordpress blog and well, he’s not too much into HTML and CSS. Sometimes he asks me for some adjustments of his design, and then I’ll tell him how he could achieve that. A few weeks ago we broke his CSS completely. I told him, that he should look at the validation result - as it was not valid. But I myself didn’t pay much attention to the results because the errors seemed to me to be unimportant. But I didn’t notice the actual problem, which the validator also reported between the few minor errors or warnings. After some searching in the code he found the missing } or something like that.
If we both had paid more attention to the validation results, we would have saved some time.

It’s also made easy by common browser extensions:
• Web Developer for Firefox - Tools » Validate CSS)
• Web Developer for IE - Validate » CSS
• CTRL+ALT+ V in Opera

I’ve never used Safari as a Primary Browser so I don’t know if Web Inspector has CSS Validation built in. If not, I’m sure there’s an equally simple way with another extension.

But it’s amazing how often I’ve made typos which some more forgiving browsers ignore, and apply the rule, while others ignore the rule. (Wish I could think of an example…)

But it’s amazing how often I’ve made typos which some more forgiving browsers ignore, and apply the rule, while others ignore the rule. (Wish I could think of an example…)

Because the number of times that I had an issue and it turned out to be something like “margin-left: 0 0 20px 4px;” (yes that’s just an error) in the CSS its just easier to have that link to the validator at the bottom in development. Rather than try to figure out whether its a bug or not. The truth is - shock horror - I’m not perfect and I sometimes inadvertently put little errors into CSS accidentally.

Others have greater attention to detail than me and can live without it I expect.

And, when you think about it, if we’re pushing web standards as a thing you aspire to meet then dismissing CSS validation as uncool or unworthy is somehow saying “some specs are wood and some are stone”.

IMO whatever works for you I guess…

I think that one of the reasons why CSS validation is rarely done is because they don’t work if they’re wrong!

Haven’t run into a validation error for two years though, since my ugly CSS is in the iefix.css file. Errors in CSS are typically healing themselves in form of weird rendering during development phase, which is fixed right away by the author.

Aptana plugin for eclipse also do live validation, correcting me on misplaced or missing semicolons, typo and similar.

I guess there’s no reason not to validate, and it practically take no time. On the other hand, I do agree that valid HTML is more important than valid CSS.

I guess the conclusion is that validating CSS is a good thing, though, to avoid misformatting and potential errors (I recently got stuck in a non-applied style in IE 6; the culprit was a rule looking like this: #navigation a:hover;{).