Why does validation matter?
In case you thought the internet was a complete free-for-all, there is an international body that governs web standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3c ) develops “interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential”. In layman’s terms this stops Microsoft running off and behaving unilaterally.
From the end user’s point of view, sites that meet current W3C standards have the following advantage:
- Everything displays correctly on today’s browsers
- They tend to load faster, because the code is more efficient
- The separation of design and html in W3C’s latest standards (XHTML 1.0) ensures the content can be used for different media and devices (e.g. Print stylesheets, mobile phones).
- Accessibility standards can only be achieved once the base-level XHTML1.0 has been reached.
You can see whether your web developer is pulling the wool over your ideas by visiting W3C’s free validator. It’s the first place to start if you want to achieve good Google visibility. If it doesn’t validate, it will be unlikely that Google will be able to fully index your site.
Congratulations to Communique 360 for winning the Jersey.com tender, but perhaps time to look at some validation issues?
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One Response to “Why does validation matter?”
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Well, that’s what the W3C is ment to do, but quite a few members of various WGs have left in recent years due to various issues with the Consortium’s processes.
Microsoft actually has a lot of input into the specs and standards produced by the W3C, i mean Chris Wilson is the chair of the newly reformed HTML WG.
Advantages:
1. My today’s browsers, I assume you mean modern browsers. Lets not mention IE, even IE7, I’m waiting for IE8 before I get excited. Saying that; Molly Holzschlag is making encouraging progress in Redmond.
2. Well, generally, but as long as you follow best practices. Having your CSS as an internal style sheet on every page isn’t going to help much; although it will probably be rendered a little quicker. There’s also the problem of “class-itis“. In short, CSS can be equally inefficient and overly-verbose.
3. HTML 4 has always had this capability, so XHTML doesn’t offer much in the way of new features; certainly not if it’s served as text/html which is needed to accomodate IE - although serving XHTML as text/html is considered harmful.
4. XHTML is not a requirement, or even a recommendation (considering parsing issues when served as text/html) for accessible content. Again, HTML 4 is no less capable. XHTML 1 is simply a reformulation of HTML 4.01 in XML.
Validity does not equal best practices. Transitional tag soup may be valid, but is equally able to be bloated and inefficient - a transitional document can use font elements all over the place and still be valid.
There are also many other factors which would/could prevent Google attaining a comprehensive index of a site:
*lack of support for conditional GET requests (correct Last-Modified and ETag headers in the HTTP response).
*obtrusive JavaScript (eg, required for even basic access to/function of site - not using the DOM approach). JavaScript of in any form is unsupported by many user agents, specifically search engine bots.
At present the Communique 360 site only has 3 validation errors - although admitedly the lack of a doctype will likely cause user agents to use quirks mode.
I’d be much more concerned about their:
*table-based layout
*Internal CSS
*Use of flash
*The fact that their internal CSS wouldn’t work (because the CSS would be treated as a comment to an XML parser, thus ignored) if the page, which appears to be XHTML based on the META element, was actually served as XHTML (using application/xhtml+xml) rather than HTML (text/html).
All that adds up to be quite inaccessible, even if it was valid.
Validity is important, but it’s not the whole story.