W3C Validation is a good idea if you can do it. There is controversy over how important it is to have your site validate to the World Wide Web standards. If you can make your site validate without errors this is in your best interest if possible.
The reason some people say validation is either not important or slightly important is that a lot of code currently that is used on web sites will not validate. Another reason for this argument is a lot of the top sites that are getting indexed in the search engines are full of errors and do not validate currently as of the time this article was written.
Currently an example of code that is full of errors are video embedding code. Most of this code that comes from these sites does not validate and is full of errors at the time this was written.
An argument for validation is that a site that is valid without errors may be a tie breaker with the engines. If a site that is tied to rank for a top position in the search engines is valid it may be able to take the number one spot from the site that is not valid. This is only speculation as search engines generally keep their programming a secret.
Another argument for validation is a less of a chance to wreck someone’s browser. Trying to fix a browser that has been damaged by this wrong coding of a web site is very difficult to fix, sometimes the operating system has to be reinstalled. Web site browsers have a way to override errors and produce the pages best they can without damaging themselves. They do have their limits.
It can be difficult to get the errors out of a web site especially content management systems, including some blogging platforms. These platforms can have very many scripts, and programming pages can be very difficult to figure out to keep them from getting errors. It can be a lot more work to try to make a valid web site depending on what type of web site you have.
Some may argue not to fool with this now and worry about getting content up on the site and getting traffic to the site and making some sales or getting noticed or famous, depending on your desire which should take the front burner. You may decide to validate your web site before you get too much content on it as another argument also.
On the other hand if you’re making money down the road from your web site you can hire someone to repair the errors and not worry about it now. You could also argue to never really worry about it as more code comes up and people use it and becomes popular and a lot of this code just is not valid.
Then there could be the argument that since there is so many new mobile devices that have internet capability, and are using their own versions of browsers, validation may become more important. Validation may become more important down the road to make sure that the web site shows up properly on these different browsers. Then on the other hand someone might say that it doesn’t matter that much since these browsing devices are designed to handle common errors that come up on web sites.
Hopefully this article gave you food for thought so you can decide what is important. Either you can have a challenge or you can worry about it some other time or not at all.
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