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Validation: What? Why? How?

Posted in Tech/Development on: Friday, June 17, 2005 by Paul Boag

Whether you are building your organisations web site yourself or whether you are using a team of web designers to do it for you it is important that the web pages which are built validate. But what is validation? Why is it important and how do you check for it?

What is validation?

Validating your web pages is about checking that they are correctly written. The pages are checked against a number of rules to identify any errors or non standard code. These rules are defined by the W3C who is responsible for setting the standards for web development.

Why is it important to validate your web pages?

There are a number of good reasons for making sure your web site is written in valid markup:

If your markup has errors in it then it might not appear correctly on all browsers. Just because it looks ok on your machine doesnt mean it will be so for everybody
Well written markup is more likely to be compatible with future technologies
Well written markup will appear quicker in your browser because the software that renders the web page won’t need to work around mistakes in the code
Poorly written markup often does not perform as well in search engine rankings
Well written markup is more likely to be compatible with related technologies such as Javascript or CSS

How do you validate your web pages

There are a number of automated tools out there which will check your markup for you. Probably the most widely used is the one developed by the W3C themselves. However today many web site development packages such as Macromedia Dreamweaver has validation software built in.

My personal favourite at the moment is an extension for Mozilla Firefox called HTML Validator which appears as a small icon below the main browser window. Surf to a page you wish to validate and you either get a green cross if it validates or a warning sign if it doesn’t. This is easy to use and allows you to be constantly checking pages for validation while surfing the web.

What did you think about this post?

One Comments

Comments are for the discussion of this post. If you have other questions / comments then post them to the forum or send me an email

Mozilla Fan says:

13/03/2006 at 6:28 am

I tried the validator, but get errors from my page and don’t know how to fix it. The validator says that cannot interpret some codes. My pages are in Spanish and don’t know what doctype to use.
Can somebody help?

Reply

Additional Information

Worth reading

Here are some recommended reading for those who want more. You can subscribe to these links via Twitter. If you have a suggestion for a link email Paul Stanton.

Produced by Headscape

Boagworld is produced by the web design agency Headscape founded by Marcus, Paul and Chris Scott. Headscape also has a number of other talented guys who blog. Check them out.

Craig Rowe is one of our amazing developers and writes some superb posts on everything from .net to AIR apps.
Ed Merritt is a Headscape designer who's blog contains examples of his work and a number of free Wordpress themes.
Dave McDermid is a Headscape developer who has an excellent blog. He blogs on everything from AJAX to security.
Rob Borley is one of our project managers and blogs regularly on client and project management issues.
Leigh Howells is our multimedia design guru (whatever one of those is). He blogs on a mixture of design and music.

Paul elsewhere

Paul just can't shut up. He publishes regular audioboos, speaks regularly and is addicted to twitter. He also has a personal blog where he shares random thoughts, inspirational articles and stuff he thinks is cool. See the latest below: