Why creating valid web pages is important
First, I will start by explaining what valid web pages mean. Having your website’s web pages validate means the code in your website’s web pages must conform to industry standards. In the case of the web, W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium ) is the people who are responsible for setting the web standards. The W3C consists of major browser developers and others. They have set certain rules to govern HTML syntax (among other mark-ups).
Basically they decide what tags are legal and what can appear in each of those tags. If your web page conforms to all the standards it means it is valid HTML. The W3C sets these standards to help with cross-platform compatibility and cross-browser compatibility to make web pages accessible to everyone. Web designers can be very ignorant when it comes to having valid web pages. Your web page might look the same in all browsers but, might still not be valid. There are a couple of reasons why having valid code is important.
Search engines might not read your web pages correctly.
Search engines have to parse the code on your website, therefore they might not be able to read the entire web page or they could possibly read it wrong. What does this mean to you? Well, the search engine might not being reading some valuable keywords for your website and could lead to you not ranking as well in the SERP (search engine results page).
Screen readers.
Screen readers are for people who have vision problems. Screen readers are basically browsers that display text-only. They read the page to the viewer. If the code is incorrect then they can’t read it correctly. Then that is one less customer you might have.
PDA and other mobile devices.
Nowadays, you check out a website on our phone, on your Blackberry, or PDA. Making your pages validate, increases your chances of your website displaying properly on all browsers. You wouldn’t want to turn away potential customers would you?
Author:
Alicia Harper
http://www.aliciaharper.com