xod Media
40 Betty Roman Blvd
Markham, Ontario Canada
L6C 0A5
http://www.xodmedia.com
Is having your Web Site's html w3c validated worth it?
December 17, 2008 - This question has been popping up lately and xod Media thought it was a good idea to answer it.
The W3C is short for the World Wide Web Consortium. They are an international consortium where member organizations, a full time staff, and the public work together to develop web standards.
Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web in 1989, together with others created the W3C, esentially to ensure the future of the web will be accommodating to the growing diversity of people, hardware, and software.
The W3C offers a validator at http://validator.w3.org/ where you can enter in your web pages, upload your web page, or enter the source code directly.
The validator will site errors and warnings and give you a detailed description of the error. This still doesn't answer why you should validate. In short, this is like spell check for your code. It checks the spelling, grammer and syntax of your web pages unseen programming.
Browsers have error correction built in to correct some of the bad code you may have, but what one browser corrects in one way, another browser will correct / or not, in another way. What you see is not what others get (WYSINWOG).
Another point, if you have bad code in the back, the search engines won't be able to read your site probably. So when people perform a search, either your page hasn't been indexed, or it won't display correctly.
Next is people with disabilities. They use screen readers that read the programming code, which in turn reads it back to them, or increased the font.
If you have bad code, these people will be stuck in an endless loop of errors, which means they leave your site. There are 51,000,000 disabled internet users.
Last point we'll leave you with. Consider the case (Maguire vs SOCOG, August 2000) where the courts awarded damages to a blind user against the owners of a website he found inaccessible. Accessibility is the law in many countries, not to say validation will make your site fully accessable, but it's a part of it.