Validating your Web pages is important
Saturday January 26, 2008
The first thing that I will always tell you to do when you have a problem with your Web designs is validate.
Many problems can be solved just by validating the HTML, but you might be surprised how many people don't do it. The validators on the Web Design / HTML site at About.com make it easy to check your HTML, CSS, and other elements of your pages to make sure that you don't have errors. Once you know they are correct, you'll be able to really get to work on solving your design issues.
Comments
Oddly enough, this very page fails validation. http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwebdesign.about.com%2Fb%2Fa%2F099181.htm
LOL
I think most if not all the About.com pages will fail validation. In fact, you’d think I’d learn to post this FAQ every time I post something about validation.
As the FAQ says, I don’t write the HTML for the About.com pages - I write the content. I’d love it if the pages followed the recommendations they give, but About.com is a huge company owned by the New York Times, and I’m one freelance writer.
If you feel strongly about seeing valid pages on About.com, you should write to About.com customer care and let them know.
Validation is great. Though I’ve read some “doubts” about it, ie: there was a rumor that google favors “non valid” pages over validated ones…but validation should be used by all developers for better web browser support.
Much of the “non-valid” code found on about.com is code supplied by advertisers. That’s not going to change anytime soon, because paying customers are better than valid code.
Google doesn’t favor “non-valid” sites, and it doesn’t favor “valid” sites either. Google’s goal is relevance to search terms. Because of the ubiquitousness of non-validating sites, it wouldn’t be a good thing if Google favored valid sites over non-valid sites, as relevance would diminish.
I try to validate my pages but one thing I find is where I have useful info linked to a third party site it is the link code that fails validation. I have tried to correct it but doing so stops the link working. examples:- my visitor counter, the weather reports and also links to maps which are vital to my site.
Just wondering if others had same problem and how they cured them.
Bob, I had a similar issue linking to Google Maps (ie code not validating; also, very long urls!) - I used TinyURL.com (http://tinyurl.com/) to overcome both problems.
Bob: Often the reason links fail in validation is because they have ampersands (&) in them. If you’re trying to write XHTML, you have to escape those characters out wherever you find them, even in URLs.
So instead of writing http://blah.com?b=1&l=2
You’d write: http://blah.com?b=1&l=2
Tedious, but that’s what’s required.