Why You Should Validate Your Website
Friday, September 21st, 2007Categories: Web Development, Web Usability
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In this week’s installment in the Web Usability series, I will be discussing website validation and why it’s crucial for every web developer to practice this. If ever you were a non-believer in validating your website, hopefully this article will convince you otherwise. After a brief introduction on how to validate your website, I’ll outline the reasons on why you should validate.
UPDATE: I play devil’s advocate in this article.
How Do I Validate My Website?
W3C.org offers tools that let you easily validate your website:
HTML – You validate your website’s HTML at W3C’s Markup Validation Service. All you need to do is type in your URL.
CSS – You can also validate your website’s CSS at W3C’s CSS Validation Service. Once there, you can input a URL for your site, you can input a URL for your CSS file or you can copy and paste your CSS code directly in your browser.
Reasons For Validating Your Website
- Troubleshooting unknown problems – Sometimes, you may be encounter a coding or layout problem and have absolutely no idea what’s going or where the problem lies. Even though W3C’s validator uses, I’ll admit it, advanced language, you can get a pretty good idea on where some of your problem areas are.
- Know what your website will look like – With discrepancies between browsers and Internet Explorer slowly losing its stranglehold on browsers, you should place importance on making sure your website looks identical to the way it does in your preferred browser. Of course, there are exceptions such as browser specific bugs. But do your research on those as well.
- Search Engines like properly formatted HTML – If you decide to open up a <p> or <h1> tag and never close it, that may have been a lost opportunity when a Search Engine spiders your website. Not many people can confirm this is true or not, but I can only imagine that spiders like neatly formatted content similar to a screen reader.
- Encourages Usability – For example, W3C doesn’t let a site pass validation unless all the images in the document have an alt attribute. eg. <img src=”sam.jpg” alt=”My dog sam!” /> This can only help people with screen readers and search engines.
- Helps you understand coding basics – A validator will let you know if you’re using a CSS or HTML attribute that isn’t capable in some browsers (such as filter). It will make sure that instead of using &, you’re using & instead.
That’s all for now, I hope that convinces you. By the way:
Related Posts
- Devil’s Advocate – Why You SHOULD’NT Validate Your Website
- 10 Web Development Tips Part 1
- What You Need To Know About SQL Injection
September 30th, 2007 at 9:23 am
This page doesn’t validate
I got my site to validate XHTML 1.0 Strict last week. I served it properly as application/xhtml+xml for a couple of days, but after I was unable to get any of the ads to work in xhtml I went back to serving text/html. Hopefully the advertisers get their act together and start putting out XHTML compliant code.
My css is next. I have like 6 errors in my css, which will be an easy fix. However, I use a couple of Yahoo style sheets for the navigation, and they are full of errors, so my css will never validate with the theme I am using.
October 2nd, 2007 at 1:47 pm
Hi mlankton,
Thanks for the comment m8.
It seems you managed to nab my website while I was fiddling around with the AddThis plugin (which I talk about in a recent article).
It seems their default code doesn’t validate. I fixed it, thanks for the head’s up and the comment!
October 2nd, 2007 at 2:40 pm
That’s why I don’t use poll plugins or google search on my site. None of them will validate.
Thanks
April 24th, 2008 at 6:22 am
good reasons..
I guess validome.org — another xhtml validator, is a great and more strict..give it a try..
April 24th, 2008 at 8:05 am
Thanks dani, I’ll give it a shot.
May 12th, 2009 at 4:59 am
Don’t know if you knew or not, but this site doesn’t validate anymore. I’m going through the process of validating my site now thanks to articles like this.
May 12th, 2009 at 7:52 am
I’m looking into it. Thanks for the head’s up!
June 26th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Website with W3C validation get better rank in search engines that increases web traffic to your website and increase exposure of your website. Your website will be less affect if browser updates in higher version.
October 21st, 2010 at 7:09 pm
I agree, although it’s hard to prove to SEO guru’s, I found valid pages (especially markup over CSS) always rank better in Google.
I put the main validators available for free over at http://www.webauditapp.com
Adding some SEO reporting too but only validation for now.
January 12th, 2011 at 10:13 am
I always like to validate my sites as best as possible mainly due to my OCD of everything working properly. I’ve never really thought too much into why I’m doing this but this post has been quite useful to encourage me to carry on doing so! It’s hard work sometimes but definitely worth it.