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It said my site had several errors, and said it is not VALID HTML.
I tried validating www.moveabletype.org
and other sites.
The validator gave errors on others too. I dont understand now.
Whats the Point of the validator.
Is it that important, does Google also use such HTML validators.
Is there ANY SITE which is 100% error free. I doubt. Even CNN has errors.
How important is this validator?
Validation is like religion. Why bother? Because millions choose to, in pursuit of higher ground. The 'enlightenment' will come when more and more XML-aware programs are running that require strict code to work. Then, any bad markup will not work. (Imagine a newsfeeder (RSS, Atom etc) which can't show you the latest newsfeeds as they are invalid.)
Of course in reality programs allow for mistakes. Even modern browsers will still show a page if the tags are messed up or missing. Otherwise 90% of the web would appear blank!
Validation is essential, but so long as you try to write valid code, you shouldn't have to worry about it too much. But it can help enormously when starting out, as you don't spot many common errors that the validator does.
Btw I love the reply you gave esp about the religion bit. It sounded very Shakesperian and very good. Are you into literature? And yes let me mention I was impressed.
Another thing, I am so sick of CMS and W3C validation that i m getting my own CMS developed inhouse.
You know I searched for a good CMS for the last 2 months!
There isnt a single on which produces good search friendly pages. The one I am getting developed is like a dream.
So lets hope it solves the w3c issue also.
But so far I havent really seen any site coming correct on W3C.
Sometimes the web makes u go crazy too. But wher can I escape and go... another website :)
webmasterworld doesnt work properly on Mozailla Firefox
It most certainly does work. Have you installed the AdBlock extension? If so, you're blocking all third-party images (which is a bad idea anyway). AdBlock is a bit broken, but Firefox certainly isn't.
Back to the original question: validation is a sign of cluefullness. If you don't validate your HTML, when you have a bug it is impossible to tell whether it is real or simply a consequence of poor markup. However, in a production environment such as with a complicated CMS, it is very difficult to ensure validity accross the board for every page - there are too many variables, and things like invalid third-party markup which are difficult to control.
Personally, I make sure my default templates always validate, although I accept that sometimes a few pages won't validate because of small errors. I also avoid XHTML (but that's a different debate).
Validation is a key part of the development process for any website, but it's not a religion (I don't agree with Hester on that one!). Use it as any other tool to improve your site, and avoid many pitfalls in rendering and spidering of pages which can come about when you use broken markup.
I also avoid XHTML
Why?
ebizdude> The biggest single practical advantage to using valid code is so that you can reasonably expect it to perform the way you want it to on multiple platforms - browser idiosyncrasies notwithstanding.
If you and all of your visitors only ever use IE 6 on a desktop PC it won't matter if your code is valid, just that your website displays correctly.
But if some of your visitors use a different windows browser (Firefox, Opera, Mozilla), a Mac browser (Safari, Camino) a Linux browser (Konqueror) or a PDA or a screen-reader or anything else, then you want to make sure that your code does not contain problems that the user-agent could stumble over.
Big famous sites don't need to have valid pages: they already have millions of visitors a day and can afford to be careless. If they lose ten thousand visitors a day because their site doesn't work properly in Firefox, they don't care.
If you look for large, well-known sites which validate, you'll be lucky to find one. But there are many smaller, independent sites which do properly validate.
call it irony but webmasterworld doesnt work properly on Mozailla Firefox.
Firefox on linux and windows works the best for in my case for webmasterworld, my line speed is around 1 megabyte per second and opera takes forever to load those little images even after many reinstalls and IE is just plain slow.
Back on topic. One reason validation is important because it can show the most obvious missed mistakes, I had a 100+ template driven site up for a long time without validating it and it turns out I had elements below the closing <html> tags which is a stupid mistake but if I had not validated them I would never had picked it up.
regards,
Mark
What HTML errors can I deliberately insert into my code which will make no difference, or even improve the page?
If you don't have a complete and up-to-date model of every possible error and how they effect all the browsers and spiders that you care about, then it is best not to deliberately insert errors while hoping for the best.
Randomly messing with something is not a good way of acheiving quality results.
This is essentially one of the points that Hester made:
The 'enlightenment' will come when more and more XML-aware programs are running that require strict code to work.
But to reinforce it a bit more with a real life technology event, look at the problems RDNS caused for some people with their email when AOL tightened their format requirements some months back. Lots of email servers with incorrect RDNS configurations that had run with no problems for the longest time because it was overlooked by most servers started bouncing email all over the place overnight. Properly configured the email servers had no problems.
IMO, why not take a little time to do it correctly from the beginning?
Helendev> That's a different debate >;->
OK, what's the URL?
