The Problem with Validation
Posted by Dan Eastwell
It’s been a long struggle, but finally accessible, and by extension valid, web pages are the norm, with innaccessible HTML and CSS banished to the last millenium
However, as with all goals, there can be the tendency for them to go too far and for the means to become more important than the means.
As a result, there’s a tendency to treat the WCAG as rules, rather than the guidelines they are.
The guidelines are littered with 'where appropriate's 'may's and 'until user agent's, thus you can’t, and really shouldn’t treat them as normative, let alone as pseudo-legal, documents
I've not been on the sharp end of this in any great way, yet, but it would be odd to not get a sign-off on a project just because of a spurious validation error. This is especially significant as validators don't necessarily come up with the same results each time.
