A Valid Argument

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There seem to be some people out there that believe that the validator provided by the W3C can test for the validity of structural markup. The rationality of this argument eludes me. The validator can only test to be sure that a document’s markup is “well-formed,” i.e., that tags are properly closed, the appropriate HTML entities are used, and that tag attributes actually exist in the version of (X)HTML specified by the DOCTYPE. It has no way of determining whether the author is using the correct tags for the document’s content. Thus, it is entirely possible for a document to be valid in terms of “well-formed (X)HTML,” and yet be invalid in terms of document structure. A script cannot determine what tags are appropriate structural markup for a document. As an example, I hacked up a dummy document to illustrate my point. I hope you have a good laugh.

As web content authors, we have to rise above the level of computers when choosing our tags.

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