W3C Validation: how important is it?

who does it serve?

[Finder]

I just spent the last several hours making sure my entire site validates. I've heard in various forums that it is important, but I'm not entirely certain what the point is. Does it serve visitors with old browsers? Or is it an attempt to standardize the Web?

I mainly did it for the challenge. :)

I was surprised at the errors I got: unconventional commenting, missing end tags, unencoded ampersands, and some weird characters that had been cut and pasted. All of my content is dynamically generated and it took me a while to figure out what exactly was getting produced. All my html is very clean now -- every page validates.

[bobriggs]

I'm very pro validation.

How does it make you feel for your pages to validate?

Does it serve visitors with old browsers?

Actually, it serves visitors with newer browsers. The point is to get rid of the old ones.

All my html is very clean now -- every page validates.

Browsers are so forgiving these days...but at least you know that whatever they're rendering 2 years from now SHOULD render the same as it does now. (no guarantees) I just think that if you're conscientious now, you'll have less work to do in the future. I could be wrong, but I think there might be a payoff. You probably won't get any benefits from it now, other than knowing that it validates.

There has to be another benefit. If it validates but displays incorrectly, you shouldn't look to the code, but maybe the logic or something else. If it did not validate, where would you want to start?

[shelleycat]

When I started validating my pages I found I was making a few strange errors over and over in all my pages. Around this time I was starting to make bigger and more complex pages and having trouble with some aspects, turned out it was those same habitual errors letting me down. So it was a great learning exercise as I probably wouldn't have figured it out otherwise. It was like a spell checker for code :)

[victor]

:) With valid code you can be pretty confident that your pages will look good in browsers and on platforms you haven't tested for, and perhaps have not even heard of.

:)If your site is the one in your profile, I can tell you it looks good in a wap phone and several old browsers, as well as looking good in the modern stuff.

(If you have Opera you can simulate the WAP phone look by going to [wap.google.com...] then Search Options / Go to URL).

If it is that site, a couple of coding errors have slipped in:

:( Side bar cell -- unclosed <tr>
:( Content cell -- unclosed <td>
:( &#169 Polish should be &#169; Polish

:) With fully validated code you can proudly add the W3C "validates as" logo on your home page -- might catch the eye of someone wanting to employ a professional website designer.

:( You also want a complete !DOCTYPE. Half-!DOCTYPES are very very common, but not a lot of use. Look up the right code at:

[w3.org...]

[Eric_Jarvis]

my take is this...you have to aim for something when creating pages...when I started I aimed for a site working in the most popular browser, Netscape at the time...then over a very short space of time the most popular browser changed...luckily I'd always had cross browser compatibility as a secondary goal...but I learned the lesson

I now aim first to make the site validate...then I tweak for IE5/6 afterwards

[Omni]

I started tweaking one of the pages on a site the other day - makes me feel really good it validates :)

[Finder]

If your site is the one in your profile, I can tell you it looks good in a wap phone and several old browsers, as well as looking good in the modern stuff.

Great! I just got done shortening the top banner yesterday because I saw my page in a smaller screen size than I am used to and it was huge. I haven't done too much browser compatibility tweaking (for instance, some of my styles don't inherit) but I'm glad it looks good. Someone was actually at the site via a Palm the other day!

Side bar cell -- unclosed <tr>
Content cell -- unclosed <td>

Hmmm... I'll try to hunt them down. I need some kind of editor that will show me which tags match with which end tags.

&#169 Polish should be &#169; Polish

D'oh! I just went through all my files last night doing find/replace. I can't believe I missed that one!

You also want a complete !DOCTYPE.

Ok, I fixed it. Thanks for the link. I was looking for a page like that.