Let's be bad

Ooo, yeah, I know. Jeffrey Zeldman reports that the CSS Validator Changes the Rules. It chokes on the Box Model Hack’s voice-family property when used in a style sheet specified with the “screen” media type. Jeffrey plans on republishing his piece tomorrow at A List Apart, which of course, will have a forum attached, if you care to respond.

Unfortunately, the issue Jeffrey discusses is nothing new. I ran into the same issues when redesigning Wired News back in June 2002. The validator complained about voice-family back then too. However, at that time, the validator would not complain about the BMH if it was used in a style sheet twice removed from the HTML (that is, a CSS file containing the BMH is imported by a linked middleman style sheet). This is partially the reason for Wired’s convoluted [ahem,… elegant] CSS file structure.

Stopdesign’s CSS is supposedly invalid. It’s been that way for about five months now. A reader notified me of the validator errors last August. We came to the conclusion that the validator was broken, and was incorrectly reporting the issue as an error, thus invalidating the style sheet. Instead, the issue should be reported as a warning.

Because of that, I’ve written it off as my one little chance to be bad. As long as the validator chokes on the BMH, I’m keeping the CSS here invalid. What a rebel…

Update: Olivier Thereaux writes a public response from the W3C that addresses this bug in the CSS Validator.

Update 2: I guess my rebel days were short-lived. Looks like the CSS Validator was changed over the weekend, as it now reports an error-free style sheet in use here.