HTML
Validators:
It’s Important To Check Your Website
SolveYourProblem.com Article Series: Web Site Design
Once you've written a web page, you can upload
it to an HTML validator. This site, run by the web's standards
body, will check that your site is valid ('correct')
HTML,
and give you some idea of how to fix it if it isn't. This is
an essential step in the development of any website – as vital
as running your text through the spell checker – but whenever
I recommend it there's always someone who wonders why it's
so important. Well, here's why.
You Know Your Code is Correct
If
your code validates, then it's correct, and therefore very
likely to work as intended on every web browser out there.
If you don't validate your pages, then you might find that
people who visit your site with less forgiving browsers see
nothing at all.
Correct
code is more likely to display correctly on many different
browsers, because it puts them into their
'standards' mode.
If code is even slightly incorrect, many browsers will use
a different way of displaying it, known as quirks mode, which
is designed to handle old and bad HTML, takes a long time
and may make your page end up with errors you didn't expect. Without web standards, you end up going back to the bad old
days of having to develop entirely separate web pages for different
browsers. Validating by the standards ensures that all working
browsers can view your content – if they can't, the fault's
with them, not with you.
Search Engines Like Valid Pages When it comes time for a search engine to add your page to
its results, it's going to have a much easier time understanding
the page if it's been validated. This will often get you a
higher ranking in the results, which means free visitors for
you. If your page isn't valid, search engines will often miss
keywords in your pages or not understand your navigation, and
may list nonsensical parts of your code under your site's name
in the search results – not exactly helpful to potential visitors
who want to know what your site is about.
Mobile Devices More and more people are accessing the web using mobile devices
like mobile phones and PDAs, and these devices have a lot of
trouble with code that isn't valid. Because they have limited
processing power, it would take them a very long time to try
to untangle invalid code – they will simply strip out the formatting
and do the best they can with it. Writing valid HTML lets users
with mobile devices see your pages as you intended.
Disabled People
When you write valid code, it becomes much easier to view
with things that aren't web browsers, such as screen readers.
Technology for disabled people doesn't tend to be as forgiving
as web browsers, so having valid code is important when it
comes to working with these programs.
Future-Proofing
Before your code will validate, you need to explicitly say
which version of HTML you had in mind when you created it.
This future-proofs your code, as each version of the standard
doesn't change once it's been decided on: a valid XHMTL 1.1
page will always be a valid XHTML 1.1 page, even if everyone
else has moved on to XHTML 5. Once you've validated your site
once, you can put it on the web and be confident that people
are going to be able to read it for a long time to come.
Finding Errors
If there's a mistake in your website's code, validation gives
you an easy way to track it down and fix it. Before validation,
people had to test their site after each change and look carefully
to make sure that nothing had gone wrong. Writing valid code
lets you use programs that will examine what you've written
and point at the exact place where the code doesn't validate.
A List of Validators
Here are a few validators that you can try. Most HTML validators
are online, but there are a few that you can download and use
on your own computer.
The
W3C validator: validator.w3c.org
The
WDG validator: www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator
CSE
validator: www.htmlvalidator.com (downloadable)
WebTechs
validator: www.webtechs.com/html-val-src
Doctor
HTML: www.doctor-html.com (downloadable)
You might also be interested in visiting the W3C's
main site at w3c.org, as well as the Web
Standards Project at www.webstandards.org.
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SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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