Do You Validate?
July 17th, 2006As I learned to code, one of the tasks that my employers would always give to me was to make sure my code was validated.
Why validate?
1) Valid code will render faster in the browser - it may not seem like a huge time savings, but every little bit counts
2) Valid code will render better in the browser - if any of your sites visitors are using a browser besides IE, if you code is not validated, there is a good chance that your layout will be adversely affected.
3) Accessibility problems might occur when using unvalidated code.
There are other reasons, but these are probably the top reason to validate your code!
Lucikly, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides two free tools to help you in validating your code.
http://validator.w3.org/ (for your HTML/XHTML pages)
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ (for your CSS pages)
As I have used these tools over the years, I found mistakes that I commonly make and have learned to not make them the first time around.
This also helps for when you have a client that wants to ensure that they are using validated code - like a government agency. I have completed web sites for both state and federal government agencies and they required that all their code be validated.
Get in the habbit that when you change your site around, do a quick run on the code validator to ensure that the changes you have made were done correct.
It will help you to continue to provide a quality product for your clients.
Happy Coding!
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