There's quite a lot of peer pressure to have your site be "W3C Validated." While cruising blogspace, I see the little W3C badges displayed everywhere, and the fact that my blog wasn't validated made me feel like a second-class internet citizen. I guess it's time I care. So, off I go to the W3C Validator to see how things look, and the result isn't pretty. Apparently, tags that have no closing tags have to be closed anyway (by slapping a forward slash at the end). Whatever. A few minutes later and BBEdit (my text editor of choice) has switched all of my line-breaks and image tags to the "new and improved" (and apparently "valid") versions. The next step takes a little longer... adding "ALT" statements to all of my images. The last step, however, is puzzling... I get a cool dozen errors on the same line because the W3C doesn't like the way an URL pointing to a search at VersionTracker is phrased. Sure, the W3C claims this is a limitation of the validating app, but the last thing I want is somebody to check my site and see a bunch of errors, so I delete the link. Oh well, at least people can click on my newly installed "W3C Validated" badges and see that I am a good little web conformist.