Website Validation For The Layman
This article covers website validation and why it is important for the layman about to buy a website.
This article is directed mainly to the website buyer who doesn't know all the mumbo jumbo, terms and abbreviations and all the techno jargon that comes along for the ride whenever you speak to a web designer or any type of programmer. Unfortunately us designers and programmers often forget just how much of our geeky vocab isn't in general English usage.
Website Validation is a measure of a website and concerns itself with how clean the background code is and if it is upto modern standards.
This is important simply because code is frequently changing. Old code is replaced by new code and new codes entirely are being added all the time. Sometimes these changes in code can force a website to perform badly (if at all) because some code has become out of date or some other similar issue.
This is where validation comes into play.
To validate a website all anyone need do is go to the W3C's validation page and type in the address of the site to be validated. Its right here!
The free validation service will tell you if your site is upto scratch with the modern web. Unfortunately a large number of website's fail validation (don't quote me on this but I believe it to be less than 1 in 10 that pass. Figure gained through personal experience) and this isn't really anybodies fault. Validation has been around for a long time but its only through the last couple of years that it is really becoming important and a lot of web designers have been able to avoid/ignore validating their website's.
Validation becomes more and more important with each passing month. Web design forums used to be places where designers would come together to show off their table based layouts and converse freely about the latest sales tactic. Now days web design forums are full of people ripping into each others poor validation.
Now the hard truth about validation is that some failures are not that bad and don't really cause any issues so it is hard to know what is important.
Some of the pro validation people will tell you that "under no circumstances should a website ever fail any validation on any error whatsoever so help me god!" They can even get quite uppity about it.
Other people will tell you its not that important and not too worry about it.
After all even this site fails HTML validation with 42 errors.
Pssst, for those of you that cant be bothered clicking the link. Its Google's home page.
So - if Google's home page fails validation surely that is proof that validation is a load of hogwash?
No, not at all.
If you are a web designer and you know the validation standards well you can easily own a website that does not pass modern validation and not worry about it.
This is purely because a web designer who understands why something fails validation etc knows what is a problem and what isn't. He/She is also highly qualified to fix it at will - or at least he/she should be.
On the other hand, for a consumer who does not know about HTML, CSS and blah blah blah there needs to be some sort of yardstick. This is where validation is your lifeline and assurance that you are getting a site that at least passes the current standards.
Because of this the "under no circumstances should a website ever fail any validation on any error whatsoever so help me god!" people are very much preaching the right attitude.
Without this yardstick you could easily be sold a site that needs a lot more work to be standards compliment and you could easily be convinced that this is ok. After all the website displays on your machine just fine.
The problem is that there are deferent operating systems, different browsers, different screen sizes and resolution etc etc. Even if everyone used the same browser and operating system they are usually configured to the owners preferences and each will display a website slightly different. On top of this it is very important to take into consideration disabled and blind users of the internet.
These are the people who probably suffer the most from the invalid side of the internet as they often browse with images turned off and use different methods of navigation than the standard point and click with a mouse choice.
^^ The above two paragraphs very briefly go into how complicated cross compliance can get. Don't think about it too much. I have for nearly six years and its the most fun I have in my day - almost as much fun as being stood on by an elephant.
An invalid website could easily be viewable to all OS's, browser types, configurations, personal preferences etc etc etc.
It all depends which part of the validation fails.
The question you need to ask yourself is 'Am I qualified to know that x validation failure is ok or not?'
If you are not qualified to answer this question then when buying a website always make sure the HTML and CSS validation certificates are part and parcel of the contract from the word go. Consider it a little like an MOT certificate for a car.