Skip to content

A podcast for those who design, develop and run websites.

Boagworld is the blog of web strategist Paul Boag who lives in the heart of rural Dorset (hence the cows). He produces a weekly podcast with UX consultant Marcus Lillington on building and running websites. They also run the web design agency Headscape.

Latest Shows

203. Why your blog fails
This week on boagworld: the secret of successful blogging, will Google personalisation affect your sites ranking and how to help users too busy to read.
202. Rocket Surgery Made Easy
This week on Boagworld: Steve Krug on monthly usability, Steve Marshall talks about form design and Paul rejoices over the new era for browsers in Europe.
201. Are clients stupid?
This week on Boagworld: We review the freelancing book Noded, discover a new web tool called 'Support Details' and Paul tells us all a story.
200. A taste of the show
This week's show gives you a taste of the live 12 hour marathon that took place to celebrate the 200th Boagworld.
199. Time to generalise
This week on Boagworld: The changing role of web designers, Colin Firth on content and Becky Jones talks about the changes at Google.

or view all shows

Have your say

Become a part of the Boagworld community...

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 ?

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 . These rules are defined by the W3C who is responsible for setting the standards for web .

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 . 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 technologies
  • Well written markup will appear quicker in your 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 engine rankings
  • Well written markup is more likely to be compatible with related technologies such as or

How do you validate your web pages

There are a number of automated 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 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

Leave a comment

Additional Information

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, has a personal blog and is addicted to twitter. He also writes and speaks regularly. Check out the most recent below: