Cornell Finch

Google Doesn’t Validate, Why Should I?

A few days ago (Ok, a week or so) Daze posted a piece of Javascript he wrote which will pop up a new window and load the W3C’s website validation service. You can read Daze’s post (and get the JS code here.

Having put it on my bookmarks toolbar, every so often when on a website I will press the button and see what errors I get on a website. I don’t tend to dig deep on the page, it’s just nice to see how crap some of the major players on teh interwebs really are. For example, loading iGoogle and pressing the buttons gives me sixty (yes, 6 0) errors and nine warnings. Facebook (when logged in on the homepage) isn’t so bad with 10 errors and two warnings.

Daze’s blog gives just 23 warnings, although he is in the middle of a new theme design having broken the old one. I think the worst I have found so far though is ePhotozine:

Eeeeeek!

Just in case you can’t read that it says 409 errors, 13 warnings. Damn that’s mucho errors!

Why is getting your site validated against the W3C standards important? Well, it means that generally your website will display how you would expect it to in a Standards Compliant browser (anything except Internet Explorer (up to 7, 8 apparently plays by the rules!). Apart from that? Unless you’re an anal code junkie it’s really isn’t that important – as long as your website looks right in most browsers and the code isn’t bloated to buggery, don’t worry about it!

For your information, before you start pulling this blog apart, I have 19 errors, all created by either the Footnotes WordPress plugin, the SHARETHIS WordPress Plugin or the code given by YouTube to embed its videos on the blog.

Strangely, I have just installed Habari to play with and apart from the validator not liking the “hr” tag the system passes the test!

Does your blog or website validate? Do you care?