I read a post in a mailing list today that made me think. I know that the homepages for the big search engines are full of errors. They don’t validate – and it doesn’t matter. They’re not hurting for it. It makes not one iota of difference as far as search engines go whether code validates.

I try (I don’t always succeed, but I always try) to make sure my code is valid for both HTML and CSS. Why do I do this? Because I feel it’s the right thing to do.

I know that there are usually many ways to accomplish the same result when you’re building a web site. I get that, and I like that. But I with my idealist viewpoint believe that there are ways that are more clean, less intrusive, easier to later understand and change than others.

Take for instance CSS hacks. When I first began using CSS heavily, I used hacks. But since I discovered conditional comments, I very rarely use a hack (the last one was about four months ago and specific to Opera). I like conditional comments because they seem to me to be a cleaner, more correct solution than toying with presentational elements in CSS that may later reveal incompatibilities as new browser versions are released (look at the list of CSS hacks that stopped working in IE7).

I met a designer last week whose work I love – he’s a very talented individual and a standards advocate as I am. We were talking about a common issue in CSS and I asked how he got around that – he agreed that conditional comments were the way to go but that he defined them within the stylesheet and not in the actual HTML page. He whipped out his laptop and showed me what he meant.

I looked at the code and thought ‘that’s a hack’ even as he said ‘this is a conditional comment.’ He supposed that a purist wouldn’t agree with his labeling.

I’m a purist. I think hacks are messy, they’re more like bandaids than real solutions. For me, conditional comments are the cleaner fix.

I validate because I care very much that my code is clean. I define clean, in part, as being error-free, and validating helps me accomplish that, most of the time. I know it doesn’t matter to search engines, nor to the vast majority of my clients. But I consider my work as a web designer/developer to be a craft – and it matters to me.