The Best Web Design Tips Blog



5 Reasons To Validate Your HTML



1.Robots/Spiders and SEO

By applying the correct techniques and rules, search engine spiders can crawl throughout your website and index your pages so that they can be found. Not validating your page can lead to serious issues. For example, you start a paragraph '<p' but you forget the '>' symbol, the spider will NOT see any of the text in the paragraph. On another note validating your pages does not increase your pagerank. Websites can still achieve high rankings without validating.

2.Not Everyone Can Visualize your Website

Web Designers must remember that the visually impaired may also be looking at their website. They very well could be using speaking browsers, or other various programs to view your website. Many users turn off images and JavaScript. You must account that they still want to see text, and view your webpage. Text generated by JavaScript wouldn't be seen by the user, and is never seen by a search engine spider. Quick tip: (Every image should have an alt attribute.)

3.The Best way to learn

Validating is simply the best way to learn HTML. Although the first few times you validate may seem tedious and uneasy, it's worthwhile. Not only will you begin to learn the code your writing, you will learn how to effectively write code for the next webpage you create.

4.Future and Browser Compatibility

To obtain 100% compatibility with all browsers is impossible. We can however write efficient and valid code to work for most browsers. Conforming to the W3C standards will make it possible for the most compatibility now and in future updates.

5.Professionalism

Everyone has seen the W3C validation icon, and there is no reason to add it to your website like it is some badge the you got from your latest boy/girl scout meeting. Most of the time when you surf the web and see these icons and click on them, the validation comes back with errors. This is unprofessional, and will only make your site credibility worse.

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