Are You Running A Valid Website?

OK… so you have a new website and you’re happy with it. But, shock horror, your friend looks at your new website and sees it all displaying funny. Why is that? and how can we prevent this?

As with all things when it comes to websites we’d have to look at the code and in the code we’d find the solution as to why it’s not displaying correctly. But as for prevention, that’s what we really want to look at and that’s what we’re going to discuss in this article.

W3C

Firstly we need to understand who W3C are and what part they play in all of this. To do that we’ll quote their description direct from their website.

“The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community that develops open standards to ensure the long-term growth of the Web”

So, in a more simpler explanation, they are the people that promote and try to encourage everyone to work on the same page. Therefore, as standard, their recommendations provide a useful insight into what improvements we (as webmasters / website owners) can do to make our websites more compatible on more than just one device or browser.

So, if we take that one step further, we’d then use their validation tools via the below links:

• CSS Validator
• XHTML/HTML Validator
• mobileOK Checker

If we run these validation tools for our websites we can find flaws and problems in our code use. As a result we can then fix them and prevent any web display errors that users might experience.