Why Validate?  -  March 31, 2008

At Just Designing we take every care to ensure that all websites we develop are validated using The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Validators. Why do we spend so much time doing this?

Internet users use different browsers to view webpages and having a standard format for the layout of a webpage allows these different browsers to translate and display the code of websites in a standardised way.

Up until 2005 this didn’t matter as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had the majority share of the browser market (more than 70%). Nowadays the browser market is divided more equally, Firefox has around a 40% share, and Internet Explorers share has shrunk to roughly 50%. Despite attempts by the W3C to standardise translation both Firefox and Internet Explorer still translate some HTML and CSS code differently meaning that developers must test their code in both browsers.

We want our pages to be indexed by Search Engines such as Google and Yahoo!, these companies spider the internet using machines therefore if the code is valid it is more likely that the search engine will be able to pick up links to other pages and cache site content.

Finally, it is easier for us to modify websites later on if we know where to find it! Ensuring our websites are valid enables us to make updates to both design and content easily.

Sam Rutley at 1:48 pm

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