Website Validation Should You Validate? (Glenn Heitkoetter)
Feb 21, 2010
It is a good idea to validate your web site to the W3C standards. There is discussion or argument over if it is worth your time to do this to make your site validate without errors. It is a good idea to make your site validate if at all possible.
The reason some people say validation is either not important or slightly important is that a lot of code currently that is used on web sites will not validate. Another reason for this argument is a lot of the top sites that are getting indexed in the search engines are full of errors and do not validate currently as of the time this article was written.
To give an illustration of code that is used on many web sites that is full of errors and does not validate is video embedding code. With most video sites this code does not validate as of this writing.
An argument for validation is that a site that is valid without errors may be a tie breaker with the engines. If a site that is tied to rank for a top position in the search engines is valid it may be able to take the number one spot from the site that is not valid. This is only speculation as search engines generally keep their programming a secret.
Another reason for validation is sites that are valid are less likely to crash someone's browser. Repairing a browser can be a real challenge and sometimes impossible without a total operating system overhaul. Browsers are designed to handle a certain amount of errors but they have their limits.
It can be difficult to get the errors out of a web site especially content management systems, including some blogging platforms. These platforms can have very many scripts, and programming pages can be very difficult to figure out to keep them from getting errors. It can be a lot more work to try to make a valid web site depending on what type of web site you have.
There is an argument that other things can be worked on instead of this such as getting traffic to the web site, building subscribers, and other activities can take a forefront. There is also the other side of the argument that states that you better get it valid before you get too much content up and you'll have a huge job to repair it.
You could decide to go ahead and work on your site and hire someone to repair things down the road when your site starts making money. Then you could say on the other side that you do not need to really ever worry about it because new code is always being made popular that people will be putting on top web sites that will not be valid.
Then there could be the argument that since there is so many new mobile devices that have internet capability, and are using their own versions of browsers, validation may become more important. Validation may become more important down the road to make sure that the web site shows up properly on these different browsers. Then on the other hand someone might say that it doesn't matter that much since these browsing devices are designed to handle common errors that come up on web sites.
So there you have something to think about and a possible challenge. You can decide if it's important to you or not.
About the AuthorLearn more VIDEO here W3 Validator. Stop by Glenn Heitkoetter's site for FREE internet business tools http://informedfish.com/w3-validator/.