ASP.Net and Web Standards

We were having a discussion the other day on our internal tech list about Web Standards and validation, and I made the comment that I like to treat web standards validation like compiler warnings, in production code ideally you should not have any, because even though the vast majority of them are benign, and browsers will happily ignore them, they could be hiding 1 or 2 that are going to cause you grief. A colleague of mine Darren Neimke, challenged me to show any of my production code that I had that would stand up to this test. So I hurriedly tried to search around for something and ended up sending him a link to my, very much work in progerss site that I set up to play around with some ajax stuff scottbalwin.com.au, just to show him that I do try to put my money where my mouth is. Of course I did double check to see if the front page validated, in fact I checked a few of the links, and all that I checked validated fine. What I hadn't quite expected was for Darren to take the time to go through all of my links until he found one that didn't. On one of my ajax playground pages I had 6 validation errors. Ok, my bad, so what was I doing wrong? Well it turns out that 2 of those errors were due to me using a code syntax highlighting control, that in and of itself produces standards compliant html, but when you wrap it inside a <pre> tag, as it suggests in the sample that comes with it, you get an error saying <pre><div> aren't aloud to go together in xhtml transitional. Ok, simply change the <pre> to a <div style="white-space : pre"> and the problem goes away with no loss of formatting... Yay, but what about the other 4 errors?

What was really weird is that when I did my usual test of openning it up in IE from my dev environment, viewing the source and then pasting the source into the validator, it validated perfectly. So confident that I'd fixed ALL the issues I uploaded it to my website. I then used the validator to test the url,  and lo and behold 4 errors... doh! it took me a while to figure out what was going on, but eventually after realising that some controls in ASP.Net can emit different html depending on the user agent that is requesting the page, and a quick little test later on my own machine and sure enough, if the user agent is IE (or firefox for that matter), the calendar control emits perfectly standards compliant xhtml transitional code, but for reasons best known to a small group of developers at Microsoft, if the user agent is "Unknown" or whatever the W3C validator claims as the user agent, it emits non standards compliant html. So I am currently trying to figure out the best way to fix this issue so that even unknown user agents receive valid html.

I now understand why people who are really serious about standards often end up writing their own ASP.Net in place of the standard Microsoft ones.

Oh and by the way Darren, don't bother checking to see if my blog validates, because it doesn't, and it is simply due to laziness that I have just selected a standard template from blogger,and haven't attempted to beat it into standards compliance. One of these days....