Not long ago, all web pages were designed with HTML tags. Then CSS took the presentation styles out of the HTML tags and into style sheets, expanding the visual capabilities of web pages. HTML has now grown into XHTML, a more mature and stable version, and with it comes some new ways of using and thinking about tags in web pages.
Web standards not only tell Web authors how to code Web pages, they also tell user agents (something used to read the Web, like a browser) how to interpret and display that code so that users can read Web pages. Web standards are a way to make sure everyone is following the same rule-book - a way to mediate the Web.
Validating a website is the process of ensuring that the pages on the website conform to the norms or standards defined by various organizations. Validation is important, and will ensure that your web pages are interpreted in the same way (the way you want it) by various machines, such as search engines, as well as users and visitors to your webpage.
Conforming to standards and regulations is one of the many ways you can make your website universally understood. Make sure your codes and styles validate across the board. That means they have to meet the "strict" standards set by the W3C Organization and pass a variety of validations for CSS and XHTML.
In simple terms, validation ensures that your website complies with the standards accepted by most web designers. That also means that it will be accessible to more people, across more web browsers and operation systems. Having an accessible website is also regarded as good web design practice. As you can see, having a validated website has its definite plus points.
To help you validate your site, here is a quick 3-step checklist:
- Validate HTML/XHTML
- Validate CSS
- Validate Links (check for dead links)
More standards information is available at the Web Standards Project and the W3C.
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