I was working away on a new web page tonight, checking that my CSS mark-up was valid. Once I got the good news I became distracted and started following links on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) site. I stumbled across a reference guide to Learning CSS.

I was quite surprised by the ugly hover effect assigned to links on the page; gray with a heavy red border. I was then further surprised to discover just how differently this page acts between Firefox / Opera and Internet Explorer 6. The page appears to have been written to look appealing in IE6, and appalling in FF and Opera! I would have expected the W3C to set a good example by presenting its own CSS pages using CSS code that works well in both of these browsers.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! I tried to validate the CSS on this CSS resource only to discover that the W3C’s own validator detected 3 errors and 90 warnings in the code! Furthermore, the HTML on the page suffers from 5 mark-up errors and no Doctype!

Who would have thought that the body responsible for the promotion of compliant CSS and HTML code would set such a poor example???

This article was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 3:05 pm