Do you think users really cares about a html and css validated website

[techu]

I use the xhtml markup validation service on my forum and found error in the page. Most of them was due to missing image alt and due to ie conditional statement.

So do you think that xhtml and css validation really matters?

[Firefox Wins]

Q) Is the average user looking for an icon in your footer related to xhtml / css markup validation?
A) Certainly not.

IMO, the important part is that your site functions well in all major browsers.

[techu]

(09-07-2010 05:19 PM)Firefox Wins Wrote:  IMO, the important part is that your site functions well in all major browsers.

well except ie6.

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

Users won't care.  But be careful though - I'm one of the few people who have images disabled, so alt tags definitely would help me, but I presume I'm really a small minority (Australian internet sucks, especially if you're screwed by Telstra).

It is ideal to follow a spec though, and I don't think it takes that much extra effort to make your code valid, so why not?  If you're doing a lot of markup it could be helpful, and it increases the likelihood of your stuff working on new browsers that pop up (eg Chrome, or maybe some new mobile browser) without having to make many amendments.

[techu]

well my index page gets validated but forumdisplay and showthread was showing more than 50 errors.
While correcting this errors I found that most of it was caused due to plugins.

And I also discovered that official tweet button and google buzz buttons were also causing problems.
So I edited the plugins templates to solve the error, but I decided not to remove  tweet button and google buzz.

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

Yeah, there's a lot of badly written MyBB plugins out there unfortunately...
But as said, if it works, then don't worry about it.  It's only really an ideal.

[RateU]

I don't know about the user. But for me, personally, I care about the validation.

[MattF]

User wise, they generally couldn't give a toss as long as the page displays correctly in their browser.

From the coder side, however, it's a must, IMHO. Firstly, if you can't even be arsed to output clean, valid code, it doesn't speak volumes about your abilities with your code which isn't visible. Perfectionism is all or none. Secondly, invalid output code will cause you more problems in the long run. You have absolutely no idea how a parser will interpret invalid code, and you will probably drive yourself to distraction at some point trying to get the output to render equally in various browsers. Some browsers will give you grief no matter how good your code, (that is an IE dig, as you probably guessed), but generally any differences in rendering are easily sorted when the output is valid. Not always so with invalid code.