Many web designers do all these things regularly on their websites, but they never validate their HTML. This seems odd to me, because while poor grammar and spelling can turn off readers and bad links are also annoying and can cause SEO problems, bad HTML can break your entire page. And I would think that a page that is broken would be even less appealing to most readers than a page with an occasional typo or broken link. There are many reasons why validating your HTML is important, and while the error messages that HTML validators generate can be somewhat obscure at times, it is possible to interpret them so that you can fix your pages.
So, if you're guilty of not validating your HTML regularly, reconsider this and take some time today to validate your HTML. Your site will thank you for it.
I love your first sentence “spelling check”. Does anyone do this anymore? I’m a blogger and I also like to read other blogs…so what is the purpose of miss-spelling words? None! Even with all the spelling check programs out there some people just don’t even know what the correct spelling is. Web-Masters are sometimes just as bad. So I say lets clean up our sites and check those words…
Its not that important, In fact a lot of my pages would fail validation because of bleeding edge and/or browser specific features.
The only tests that need to be done is firing up a multitude of different browsers (with and without javascript/css enabled) and checking your pages appear and function correctly.
Ya..i am fully agree with your article..it is very important to validate html for good web designing.thanx for tips.
You can’t test in all the thousands of browsers that exist and so validating your HTML etc is the only way of making sure that it will work correctly at least in all the browsers that follow the standards.
While testing your page in the top 4 or 5 browsers may show that your invalid HTML works for the people that use those browsers it would only take one person using a more obscure browser that your page doesn’t work in (particularly if the person is disabled and using a browser specific to their disability) to result in massive problems for you – either through their telling their friends how poorly coded your site is and them telling their friends etc – or worst case with them taking you to court for discrimination.
Validating is very important! code which is valide will load faster and look better in different Browsers. And search engines like Google like valide codes… May you get a better ranking because of this!
That is true. We solved most of the problems while watching a site in different browsers by validating the code with W3 org.
For SEO it is important to “protect” a smart and easy way for the google bot.
thanks for posting.
it was very useful.
thanks & regards,
pluskb
Have you done a validation check on any major website?
google.com, microsoft.com, yahoo.com, about.com, apple.com all fail validation.
Creating valid HTML and CSS breaks good designs because no browser is fully standard compliant.
@Petah:
I think the thing to consider is that the designers at the sites you mention typically work in teams and have a lot of resources to make sure their sites work as they expect in the browsers they expect.
Most freelancers don’t have those kinds of deep pockets, and validating your HTML is a cheap (free!) way to keep problems from cropping up.
Note: no where do I advocate “breaking a good design” for the sake of being valid. But I do strongly recommend that people who are having trouble getting their pages to look as they wish them to make sure that they aren’t introducing more problems with invalid code.
Another thing to consider is that Google states that they recommend sites have “correct HTML”. http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?&answer=35769#1 And the easiest way to do that is to make sure it’s valid.
In fact, one site went so far as to test to see if it were a myth that Google prefers pages with valid HTML. And so far, the results seem to show that Google does indeed favor sites that are valid: http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-blog/index.php/official-google-prefers-valid-html-css/
The irony is that this web page currently (27th Feb 2011) has 87 Errors and 7 warnings on the W3C Markup Validation Service
I forgot to include my FAQ about this site and validation. You’re right – it doesn’t validate. And if I were in charge of the HTML for it, it would. Why isn’t the HTML on the About.com Web Design / HTML site valid?
We missed validating our codes during the first 3 years.
Since 2001 we validate with W3 org and our results are amazing.
The different browser views minimized, the sites loaded faster and the SEO values became better. So… Validate your code guys