VALIDATE MY WEB SITE |
WHAT IS VALIDATION? |
VALIDATE MY WEBSITE HERE |
| Most pages on the internet are written in computer languages (such as HTML & XHTML) that allow Web Designers to structure text, add multimedia content, and specify what appearance, or style, the result should have.
As for every language, these have their own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written with these computer languages are supposed to follow these rules. The (X)HTML languages, for all versions up to XHTML 1.1, are using machine-readable grammars.
However, just as texts in a natural language can include spelling or grammar errors, documents using languages may (for various reasons) not be following these rules. The process of verifying whether a document actually follows the rules for the language(s) it uses is called validation, and the tool used for that is a validator. A document that passes this process with success is called valid.
With these concepts in mind, we can define "markup validation" as the process of checking a Web document against the grammar it claims to be using. |
WHY SHOULD I VALIDATE MY WEB SITE? |
Search engines accept web pages and try to display them even if they're not legal HTML/XHTML. Usually this means that the search engine will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant.
The problem is that different search engines (or even different versions of the same search engine) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML/XHTML is really pathological, the search engine could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.
That's why you want to make sure your web pages are legal HTML/XHTML. The best way to do that is by running your web site and/or web site web pages through one or more HTML/XHTML validators. |
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