Why You Should Validate Your Website

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:

Do you have a website? Check chat free chat for local teens 18+

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