A tip for those with CSS3 and/or vendor errors

[johnmaguire2013]

Originally Posted by subrc

I noticed this as well a while back, and changed our "CSS" link in our footer like you did. Turned out our stylesheet still had some errors in it thanks to normalize.css. I'm not too bothered by it though, and here's why.

There's technically no accessibility benefit to using completely valid CSS. CSS is just a presentation tool after all. Valid HTML is important because it allows your website to target browsers which you don't usually think about, such as search engines and screen readers. Valid CSS doesn't let you do this.

I have a hard time thinking you need to worry about whether you get errors for using vendor extensions in your CSS. Or about whether or not you are using hacks in your CSS, for that matter.

So right now, our website doesn't have valid CSS, and I'm not too bothered to change that. I'd love for someone to prove me wrong here and get me to fix that.

I have two counter-comments: First of all, if your CSS isn't valid, it will display differently in different browsers (even if they aren't the most commonly used ones) and even if it doesn't, you are supporting non-standardized code. Non-standardized code is what led to the <blink> and <marquee> tags. I also can't find the link right now, but there is a page which talks about how even vendor extensions are bad, because some users only use, for example, -moz-border-radius, instead of using the other browser's implementations, or the standard one as well, and other browsers are eventually going to start supporting each other's vendor extension implementations because it's the only way their users can see the same thing on particular websites. This is an issue because they are now adding in faux standards to the CSS specifications.

Additionally, I believe if you are going for the website award, valid CSS is a part of the rubric.