Most designers ignore the W3C test when coding their themes simply because it is a test too tough to pass.
Nevertheless, to comply a theme with W3C is important because of the following benefits:
- Compliance helps the search engine rankings as compare with non-compliant websites. Frederick Townes of W3 EDGE Web Design explained well below:
Proper use of standards and bleeding edge best practices makes sure that not only is the copy marked up in a semantic fashion which search engines can interpret and weigh without confusion, it also skews the content-to-code ratio in the direction where it needs to be while forcing all of the information in the page to be made accessible, thus favoring the content. We’ve seen several occasions where the rebuilding of a site with standards, semantics and our proprietary white hat techniques improves the performance of pages site-wide in the SERPs.
- Compliance helps ensure that your website is accessible from a number of devices; from different browsers to the growing number of surfers using PDAs and cellular phones.
- Compliance will also help ensure that regardless of the browser, resolution, device, etc. that your website will look and function in the same or at least a very similar fashion.
Exclusion of Test Error 1
The current CSS validator is tested for CSS 2.0 but higher versions are already available such as CSS 2.1 and CSS 3. The fact is some of the properties that pass CSS 3 test may fail in CSS 2.0 test.
Hence, we have to exclude the errors that fail the validators (CSS 2.0) but pass the higher CSS versions.
The followings are the errors that we’ll treat them as pass.
CSS exception:
# -moz-border-radius
# -khtml-border-radius
# -webkit-border-radius
# border-radius
# any property starting with _, eg. _width
Reference: http://www.wellstyled.com/css-underscore-hack.html
XHTML exception:
* role=”something”
Exclusion of Test Error 2
We only test for the code compliance of the themes and exclude all plugins in the testing.
Take the Featured Content Gallery plugin for example, this plugin fail the CSS validator as shown below:
Once we deactivate the plugin, it will pass the test as seen below:
It is not easy to make a theme W3C compliant so the themes that pass the tests (XHTML and CSS) will get 2 points each for the general tests and 1 point each for the SEO test.
XHML and CSS in General Test
XHTML and CSS in SEO Test
