by Susan Kliebenstein

Created on: January 22, 2008

The World Wide Web Consortium also known as W3C is an international organization committed to the development of protocols that standardize the development of the Internet. Working with input from web users everywhere they define and publish the standard languages that are used to communicate from web documents to web browsers. That's what is so amazing about the web. It allows different computers, using different operating systems and different browsing software, to communicate with all the other users who are viewing, no matter what browser or operating system they are using. This is something we take for granted today, but it was not always so. These protocols are important.

So the first reason to validate HTML is to assure that your code comes as close as possible to meeting the most recent standards. If it does then your page will be properly read by any browser that a user might have. If not, there may be browsers that will render your page in an unreadable manner. If you want your page to look good to every user, you've got to validate.

Anyone can validate their web page at http://validator.w3.org/ and receive feed back on each error found in the code of any web page. Just type the address of the page into the free validation site and your results will appear immediately. There are copy and paste elements that you may want to use that will not pass the validation test, but at least you can make sure that the code that you have written is compliant.

The second reason to validate HTML is that its a good way to learn to write better HTML code. It keeps you growing with the changes. Changes made now in HTML protocols may not change the way your page is rendered by current browsers, but future browsers may be less forgiving.

The third reason to validate is that it contributes to the development of the web. Web development can only move forward as the users are willing to participate by incorporating the newest protocols into their coding. If W3C has developed HTML 5.0 but users are still coding with HTML 3.0, it makes it hard to move on to new innovations.

You may be quite proficient in the use of HTML, or maybe you're just struggling to make the most basic elements work for you. Either way, validation of your code is important to make your page appear as you like, to raise your consciousness and teach you to write better code, and to contribute the forward progress of the web as a whole. Make sure to check out the information at http://W3.org and validate every page at http://validator.w3.org/.

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