Website Development & Maintenance by Syosoft.com

At first, web page validation may seem trivial and even unnecessary. However, if you think about its purpose a little further you begin to see how important the rules and guidelines are.

Consider for a moment that automobile manufacturers followed no guide lines, no best practice rules, and simply ignored the standards set for their industry.

What value could consumers put on testing or safety ratings? Prices would sky rocket as the manufacturers would have to develop their own systems for every aspect of assembly. Want to buy some new rims? They'll be far more expensive as well because the company manufacturing them cannot create them in bulk knowing that the specifications could change at any time. I think you get the idea.

A system like that would be a complete mess and cost everyone a lot more time and more importantly, money.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in October of 1994 by Tim Burners Lee (the inventor of the internet, by the way) with the goal of creating a standard for web page markup, among other things. The standard then became the outline for how browser development companies should interpret web page markup and render display.

Some web sites carry the label: "Best viewed in ." While it is clearly easier to develop for a single browser, doing so will present a percentage of visitors with a sub par (and somewhat unusable) version of the web page.

The problem with this standard is that it's only a standard. Companies can choose which rules they wish to follow or ignore when developing their browsers or worse, they can make up their own markup ("This web site is best viewed in Internet Explorer" and more recently "Best viewed in FireFox"). This hasn't become too great a problem as any company who is out for market share, must follow most of the W3C standards so web sites are presented mostly correct.

Still wondering why you should validate? Validation is the simplest way to insure your web site will appear as intended across as many browsers and devices as possible.