Does code validation really matter and if so to whom does it matter to, a website visitor, a search engine, both? Not everyone thinks that code validations are all that important and feel that search engines do not consider validation when ranking a website. Regardless of the impact that code validation has on a websites ranking, both sides of this discussion can agree that code validation is useful for a number of other reasons.

 

http://validator.w3.org/

Code validation is the process of inspecting and amending the code or your web documents. This is done by comparing the code to formal standards like those established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The W3C is the main international standards organization for the Internet. This organization offers a markup validation service to check HTML documents for errors and ensures that they are in accordance with their standards. To fully validate a websites code two separate assessments need to be performed, one for the HTML or XHTML and another for the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Although a number of programs like XHTML-CSS offer code validation services that are based on the standards set forth by the W3C it might be best to use the actual html validator and css validator provided by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Getting back to why it is important to validate your code regardless of how it impacts the page rank, of the many reasons for validation there are 6 fundamental reasons why it should be done.

Debugging and Maintenance:

HTML and CSS validation works similarly to a spell checker by locating errors found throughout your web documents. During the validation process errors are identified and documented so that a user can easily fix them.

Learning and Prevention:

As the validation process identifies common errors you can learn from your mistake and therefore prevent the… Read the rest