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Tuesday, December 16, 2008

What is Validation and why validation is important?

Validation is a process of checking webpages against Web Standards, mainly those which are published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Validation is done for HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML, CSS, RSS/ATOM Feeds, XML-derived Web document types, WapForum for WML, etc. Every language has its own grammar and syntax and so every document designed with these computer languages are expected to follow these guidelines and rules so that they are standard complaint. The markup languages of all versions use a specific declaration called Document Type Declaration (DTD) which is machine-readable grammar, inherited from SGML. When a webpage passes through this validation process then the page is called valid.


Validation is also a kind of Quality Control for Webpages around the World Wide Web which does not assure everything but suggests being a good criterion for webpages. Validated pages are expected to perform consistently over different platforms and are almost assured to be errorless, stable and user friendly. Validation is done against the DTD it specifies to be using and following.

There are several reasons why validation is important:

Consistency: Whatever you design on a webpage is presented by different browsers in different ways. So if you don't follow the standards the presentation of your design maybe different with different browsers since the browsers tends to follow the standards as much as possible. Validated codes are predicted to be consistent over various browsers and operating systems, since you can't check on all of them.

Uniform correction by browsers: Whenever you write some code which the browsers may not be aware of, they try to guess and present the webpage as per their understandings. Different browsers have different understandings and guesses.

Page Loading Time: Browsers are habituated to render standard codes. If you don't follow the standards, then it will make the browsers think and will increase your page loading time making your site slow.

Search Engine Friendly: Creating websites by the standards makes the pages search engine friendly too. Search Engines always loves standard coding techniques.

Future Compliance: Technologies and devices change every time. Several new technologies and devices are being introduced daily. So if your site is by the standard then you can ensure your site to be in compliance with future technologies.

Accessibility: If you are going by the standards and proper guidelines, then your site is also predictably accessible to assistive technologies. Thus you are also getting advantage on accessibility point of view which is a better quality control for your site.

Coding satisfaction: After all it gives you a satisfaction of generating codes which are by the proper standards and accepted almost everywhere. Clean and high quality coding is also good to look at.

So now as you got the importance and advantages of validating your code, you can easily validate your pages at http://validator.w3.org.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I too was thinking that Validation is important. But didn't know that it has so many good effects. Now my ideas are far more clear.
It's really a very good standardization process by W3C.

SEO Specialist Troy said...

Validation of website is very important because it affects the ranking of website where web designing and seo services are being done.


Cheers,

David

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