Does anyone really pass the CSS validator?

So we have this lovely criterion on the Website Award rubric:

How much care was taken when designing the website with regards to web standards such as valid HTML and CSS? (i.e. Does the site pass the W3C markup validation service http://validator.w3.org/)

And a couple of weeks ago we were trying to get our site to validate. Our HTML passed without a hitch, but our CSS did not.

But all was not lost. What if we play around with the vendor extensions setting so that we don’t have to worry that that’s not technically valid CSS? What if we set it to CSS3? Epic fail. Some of these are kinda reasonable, like the IE specific CSS. Some things are kind of frivolous, like this one:

.one-column article.feature-image.small .entry-summary: Parse Error [empty string]

Which, in reality, isn’t blank.

I went for a walk in the rain when that error showed up.

Mrs. Rosenthal, our web sub-team mentor, pointed out to me, though, that almost no site made in the past five-ish years validates CSS. Not even the W3’s homepage does.

Well, because, there’s no point. There’s no point in creating a website that can comply with this little judgment script, because it hasn’t been keeping up quickly enough with what people actually do when making websites.

Hopefully, someday it will. Hopefully before next year so that we can get it validated for the next build season. But until then our website fails. And we’re okay with it.