where he has found 75 errors and has asked me to address them. This is quite a task that I had not initially anticipated having to do and I have not done it on any other site I built in RapidWeaver before.
I realise that correcting these errors could make the site more compliant and I want to do the best for my client so I’m interested to know two things…
Is it my responsibility to fix ALL of these errors on his site before going live?
Should I contact the developer about this as they could be inherent to code of the theme?
I guess that answering point 1 will require overriding the code in the CSS panel of RapidWeaver?
It’s probably worth reviewing those errors and fixing up glaring ones or more important ones if you can (I didn’t look closely and won’t pretend to be an expert on what you should change). However, it’s worth noting that a couple of example sites I put in that checker - Google and Apple - both had 20+ errors.
Some of these online tools are good for catching things but I don’t know that striving for 100% provides a ton of real world impact.
Some you likely won’t have much control over by virtue of using a ‘drag and drop’ style tool like Rapidweaver (vs a completely hand coded version).
Sounds like they’re just being awkward. Just fix what you can and show the results from Apple and Google. Also, you could consider asking for more money to do everything.
Just following on from my previous message, I though you might like to know about how approached the subject of a W3 validation request from my client.
First of all I contacted Joe Workman about it and he gave me this response…
W3C validators pick up these sorts of things in just about every site. There are so many things that it does not take into account. This was perhaps more appropriate to use this in the days of HTML4 but not necessary with HTML5, even Google considers it to be outdated technology which is why they don’t even validate their own site… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg_
I can assure you that the theme you have used has been thoroughly tested in all the most popular browsers and will function perfectly well. The good thing is that none of these points you see will affect website performance or SEO.
Whilst I was waiting for the above response, I also got in touch with three independent site builder colleagues of mine who build sites using RapidWeaver as well as hand coding…
Modern web browsers are designed to be forgiving and will perform just fine despite what the validator might find - code is after all a language and just as spoken language has thousands of variables so does html. If browsers were strict about html validation, most websites would not work.
All themes, regardless of the tool that has been used to build it, will have code validation requirements. For a site to be fully validated it will need to be hand-coded in the first place (considerably more expensive).
It is not worth tweaking the code in a theme because any theme updates will render your fixes obsolete.
Critical errors won’t have got through the theme developers testing and if they do they will be fixed in an update.
I’m sure this would chime in with what your response might have been but I thought it might be useful information in case anyone other RapidWeaver user finds themselves in such a position.
My client has accepted this response and the site has now gone live… http://www.symbiotic.co
Thanks Neil, a lot of work went into that and the first time I used Chillidog’s Grid Iron 3 Stack as well for the Google spreadsheet on the glossary page.
Luckily the client for that site is too dumb to notice 