Next Step Validation

Why We Validate Our Web Site

The Web, as in everything in life, is based on standards. Standards help to define and describe recommendations and specifications for a particular task or industry. Web Standards are thus a set of guidelines established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standards bodies for creating and interpreting Web-based content. Web designers and developers abide to the W3C's recommendations to create Web pages, while browser vendors use the recommendations to render the Web pages.

We spend a considerable amount of time and effort solving problems with different browsers. But Web standards purists at Web Standards Project argue that the browser makes are no longer the problem. The problem lies with designers and developers chained to the browser-quirk-oriented markup of 1990s, who failed to realize that it is possible to support web standards while accommodating both new and old browsers.

While designing for Web standards has a steep learning curve, the conveniences far outweigh this downside. In this issue of Hot Scripts Newsletter, we discusses some of the conveniences to encourage you take the plunge into Web standards design and take the Web to the next level.

Advantages of Web Standards.

Cleaner Markup:

Web standards insist on writing clean, valid, modular and semantically correct markup. For example, "font" tags are no longer used to define font attributes of text- instead, it is defined by the style sheet. By doing so, it simplifies the code and makes it easier for us to troubleshoot and maintain. This helps other staff in an organization to easily understand and re-use the code, and helps applications easily convert the code into another format.

Forward and backward compatibility:

Web standards is not just about forward compatibility. It is true that it will ensure that your code works in current and future browsers, but it also caters to older browsers whereby your web page will degrade gracefully to produce an acceptable result in such older browsers.

Accessibility:

Web standards helps make the content accessible to a wider range of users, including those with disabilities. With the markup code being cleaner, specialized devices for visually impaired users can read out the content. This also allows users to customize pages to their needs using style switches and provides a printer-friendly version of Web pages.

Cross browsers and platform:

Perhaps one of the most important reasons to shift to standard Web pages is that it helps avoid cross-browsers and platform issues. With XHTML's strict nature, your page is likely to be displayed correctly on all devices (computers, PDAs, mobile, etc…)

Better SEO:

By complying with Web standards, you can achieve better search engine ranking. If your code is cluttered, it will be harder for search engine spiders to locate and index your content.

Easier site maintenance:

By using CSS to separate content from presentation, site-wide changes become much easier. For example, you will only have to change your style sheet(s) rather than all pages.

Save Bandwidth:

With less code and cached CSS files, you can save considerable bandwidth. For example, if your cached CSS file is about 3KB per request and your site has an average of 10, 000 page views per day, that's 10GB of bandwidth saved for an entire year. Now, that's a great save on your Web hosting costs.

Faster loading page:

When a page is validated, browsers do not have to interpret your bad markup and make rendering assumptions. Therefore, the page will load much faster. With less markup code and cached CSS files, the further it helps to make your page load faster.

Validation Services Used by Next Step:

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) CSS Validator

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML Validator

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Atom or RSS feeds

You can use the above Validators to check your own site if you have paid someone to build the site and it does not validate you should ask them why??

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