Validated Markup?
Validated what? I just want a Web-Site!
You are ready to take your business or information online, you have searched and shopped around and here you are after stumbling across this article.
I want to start out by saying something that wont make a few other designers very happy, and that is this.
If you ask a prospective design firm or freelancer if they ‘Validate Web Site Markup’ and they tell you no or even worse ‘Markup Validation is not important’, then please RUN AWAY, hang up or get in your car and move on to the next prospective designer. Why should I do this Daniel, you may be asking yourself. Well reader, I am happy to explain!
I will start by quoting an article that can help colorfully explain it much better than I could:
What is Markup Validation?
Most pages on the World Wide Web are written in computer languages (such as HTML) that allow Web authors to structure text, add multimedia content, and specify what appearance, or style, the result should have.
As for every language, these have their own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written with these computer languages are supposed to follow these rules. The (X)HTML languages, for all versions up to XHTML 1.1, are using machine-readable grammars called DTDs, a mechanism inherited from SGML.
However, Just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using Markup languages may (for various reasons) not be following these rules. The process of verifying whether a document actually follows the rules for the language(s) it uses is called validation, and the tool used for that is a validator. A document that passes this process with success is called valid.
With these concepts in mind, we can define “markup validation” as the process of checking a Web document against the grammar (generally a DTD) it claims to be using.
Why should I validate my HTML pages?
One of the important maxims of computer programming is: “Be conservative in what you produce; be liberal in what you accept.”
Browsers follow the second half of this maxim by accepting Web pages and trying to display them even if they’re not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.
That’s why you want to follow the first half of the maxim by making sure your pages are legal HTML. The best way to do that is by running your documents through one or more HTML validators.
A lengthier answer to this question is also available on this site if the explanation above did not satisfy you.
Source: W3G
For a much more intense discussion about Valid Markup: SEO Consultants
If you are going to pay (however much) for a website, you want:
- Your website to be consistent in all browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari Et Al.)
- You want your website to be consistent across all Operating Systems (Mac, Windows, Linux)
- Most importantly, you want to not pay for a major update to your site every couple years
If your website has been designed with an up to date Doc-type and it has been validated, you will not need to worry about updating the code for years to come, even when new markup standards come to being used.
How can this all affect the Seo of my Web Site?
Wait, what is SEO exactly? I am so glad you asked this question. I will be happy to explain it in my next blog-article thingy.
Been involved in Programming and web design for over 10 years. I have had the pleasure of working with Nasa/Visium, One of the Sam's Club Development and marketing teams, Mixcat and many others. With memberships in: Joomla! Experts Group, Google Webmasters Experts Group, SEO Experts Group, The Web Standards Group. Only using the freshest Programing and design standards, you can trust our team to make your projects and ideas a reality.
Awesome Post
I completely agree, everyone should be validating their site. It isn’t even that hard at-least if you know what you are doing from the start.
Thank you Zubair, I agree with you and something important that I didnt mention is if the code is valid today, It will be valid tomorrow. Validation will stand for years to come once the care has been taken to produce clean, fast, valid code.
What a nice read that was! And to think I began with the notion that “I” would do my own website.
The more work of yours I get to see and get a feel for some of the things that even go into it that I never knew existed, the more I am glad to have employed your services. Keep up the great work and for keeping up with everything you do.