The First Sign of a Web Professional: Valid HTML

A lot of things have changed with web design since I first started coding web pages over 10 years ago. Back then, all of the code looked like English because it was written by hand, and what was generated by computer looked like a giant block of alpha numeric garbage. With innovative programs and scripts such as FrontPage, Dreamweaver and Joomla, every kid with a laptop and a 56k connection is now hawking web design services on the net. The one standard that hasn’t changed among the serious web development community is the requirement for valid code.

While design quality is completely in the eye of the beholder, the one mandatory requirement for a design to be labeled as a professional design is valid HTML code. HTML code is considered valid when the best practices are used and common mistakes such as duplicate object names are evident. While there are several ways to validate html code, the industry standard is the W3C validation service.

The W3C Markup Validation Service is free, and has been used to judge whether code is valid since I started back in the 90s. All you have to do is copy and paste the address of the page you want to validate into the validator, and the program does the rest for you. You can also specify the validator to show you the errors in the code so it is easier to go back and fix.

I know the last thing you want to do after spending several hours developing your website is to go back and fix small mistakes that do not affect the display in your browser. The most important reason to validate your code is that valid code is more likely to display properly across all platforms, and is more accessible to all users of the internet. Valid code is also a sign of professionalism that is not only going to be checked by potential clients, but is mandatory to be considered for hundreds of web quality awards that are assigned every year. Even though Google denies it, many SEO specialists believe that websites with valid code will rank higher in searches.

I always put the extra effort in to make sure at least my Index pages validate. I recently found that Google’s +1 button was not valid in XHTML 1.0 transitional because it was written for HTML 5. Instead of getting rid of the code, I reprogrammed it to use a Java command that was valid, and worked just as good as the snippet that came from the Google +1 page.

Using portals and blogging software such as WordPress add another degree of difficulty to validation. I recently ran into problems in the display comments widget for WordPress that arose from not having any actual comments in my database to act as a placeholder. I have also invalidated my website by simply adding extra parentheses in an alt tag for an image. These are both problems that would not occur in manual scripting, but are easy to miss when you are entering text into form fields that will eventually be inserted into your code.

Even if you are using blogging software, there is no excuse for having code that isn’t W3C valid. Remember to check next time you design a site yourself, hire a designer, or are curious to someone’s skillset. You can tell a lot about a web developer by giving their homepage this quick and simple test. After validating your own site, make sure to get your ‘W3C Valid’ button and display it on your web page with honor!


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