I’ve been trying out BB on an existing WP site that had existing – but extremely limited – content. I was using WP theme 2013 because it was the oldest theme that gave 0 errors in the W3C validator.
I installed the BB theme and plugin, and tinkered with the Home page using the Grand template.
I’ve been tinkering with the site for a few days, (but no PHP or CSS changes), so I can’t claim that I haven’t broken something. But this morning, out of curiosity, I ran their CSS validator again.
I got 100 errors (I think it stops after 100), and 390 warnings.
To see if the theme had anything to do with it, I reverted back to the 2013 theme. This time I got 87 errors and around 200 warnings.
Then I re-activated the BB theme, and changed the Home page template to the blank template. The errors dropped again, to 45 errors and 86 warnings. Remember, this was a site with zero errors before BB.
What’s up with that?
For my next step, I’m going to revert back to the pre-BB version (the site is so small, this is no big deal), and start over. My question to you guys is: what if I still get all these errors?
These are errors from the markup of the site, from how both the BB theme and plugin shows its contents. So if you go back to the old theme and not use the Page Builder, I don’t think the errors would still be there. Let us know if you find/need anything further.
Ben, I used the W3C CSS validator, not the nu HTML validator. On your URL, the W3C CSS validator shows 108 errors, 435 warnings.
Let us know if you find/need anything further.
Well, yeah, I do: I need software that doesn’t have all these errors! Where I come from – flight software for space satellites – ONE error is one too many. We had to program to the “Zero Defects” standard. I’m more than a little disappointed to hear that you guys don’t.
Hi Jack! Thanks for the heads up. I would love to learn more about your experience with satellite software! How cool!
Validators are very valuable tools, but they can be a bit “over critical.” The majority of websites won’t pass the CSS validator (try wordpress.com or google.com). Although, using a validator can reveal critical bugs/errors in you code, we don’t make an effort to “pass” the validator.
For CSS, I much prefer to use this linting tool versus the W3 validator:
That said, we’ll take another pass and see if there are any improvements we can make. It’s important to us that Beaver Builder generates efficient/quality code.
This post is of interest to me as I’ve just had a proposal accepted for a website where achieving level A with W3C validator will be required.
Can you tell me if you made the improvements you spoke of in the post?
My default tools for building websites now are BB theme and page builder plugin every time, I’ll be disappointed if I need to use a different theme or plugin in order to meet the standards.
Unfortunately, this isn’t really feasible, as the W3C CSS validator doesn’t recognise browser specific properties such as -webkit-xxxxx, -ms-xxxxx, -moz-xxxxx and so forth. As these are not defined in the standard CSS specification.
As Robby suggested, if you want to make sure your CSS is valid, it is better to use a linting service or add a lint package to your code editor. I personally use the linting packages for the Atom code editor.
So is the W3C CSS validator now considered to be not fit for purpose when validating a website for accessibility?
I still have a problem of deciding to build the website with BB or not as the funding contract specifies validation with W3C. This is obviously not a straightforward matter, I’ll always use BB when I have a choice. My problem is that I don’t know if I should use something else in this case to satisfy the contract.
Thanks for great support and for taking the time to explain things.
To answer your question, this an arts based project and my client hopes to receive grant funding from a source of EEC (European Economic Community) support. This type of funding is quite common in the UK and the funders impose certain standards to qualify for the funding. Things have probably moved on considerably since they decided to insist upon on W3C accessibility standards and I’m not sure they understand what they’re asking for in current terms.
It may be that I could build the site with BB and follow best practices and be fine however I don’t want to take any chances of the site not validating to the stated requirements and funding being withdrawn.
I understand the importance for passing the validator, but you could literally check any high ranking website such as Google.com, Facebook.com, WordPress.com to name a few and all of them have error when checked via the validator.
I think the best course of action is to (if possible) contact the funders and ask them for specifics and also inform them of how to provide the best possible experience for visitors, there will likely be errors due to the validator not supporting browser specific properties.