It is very important to validate your website, even if it is working “fine” for you. The reason for that is simple, if your website has HTML or CSS errors it will rely on the error correction function of browsers.
Not all browsers correct errors on the same way though, meaning that your website might break down for some readers. Apart from this practical reason web standards also play an importante role on the compatibility issues of the Internet. The more people complying the better. Below you will find three web tools to validate your site, check them out:
- W3C Markup Validation: this tool will validate your HTML or XHTML markup. You can use a URL directly or upload a file.
- W3C CSS Validation: this service will validate your CSS. Again it can crawl your website or an uploaded CSS file.
- Feed Validation: this tool will validate all versions of RSS feeds as well as Atom feeds. This will ensure that readers will not have problems while receiving your feed.
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
Theres about 200+ errors and 24 warning when i tried to validate my blog. Well, at this point i think i might just change my template or just ignore the errors and warnings. i read the comment above and still dont see the importance of validate it accept so that the blog run smoothly and easy for google bot and stuff. Anyway, nice post.
I’m creating a new version of my website… I just spent the past two days fixing errors on the new-site-so-far so it would validate. I’m proud to say not only does it validate, it looks great in every current browser (a feat I didn’t think I could accomplish). Then out of curiosity, I started checking the validity of other websites. I can’t find a single site that validates! Even this blog about how important it is to validate your site has dozens of errors. Are there any sites of significant size out there that validate, or will mine be the only one?
How do you validate a website that is built in MySQL and PHP?
This article helped me for a paper I had to write thanks!
How to validate a blog
I have seen too many horribly coded websites rank in the top 10 to say that it will guarantee rank increases. Should you still do your best to make sure your website validates, absolutely.
This is something i did a while back and i have to admit its definitly worth doing it offers you a complete smooth and easy to use website.
Does having valid markup help with your search engine placing?
Nothing but praise for promoting the use of standards, keep it up!
Alright now Daily Blog Tips is using 100% valid markup!
Daniel —
Yeah there are 6 errors related to image tags or something, I have been trying to solve them for a couple of time. Any help is welcomed ;).
I note in passing that Daily Blog Tips does not presently validate …
Feed validating is another good reason to use FeedBurner.
I just updated the post with a sentence about this “importance of web standards for the web usability” argument.
Roberto, I don’t agree.
I usually agree with you but this time I found that this advice is wrong, or at best it’s not that important. Why? My experience has taught me that it doesn’t matter if your xhtml/css code is flawless: it will have rendering problems in major browsers anyway (both IE and Firefox suffer from some unusual behaviors when dealing with certain pieces of xhtml/css code).
I agree – those sites are top of my list whenever I write new pages, or make any changes to existing ones.