Key Site Concepts: Validation

This is the third in a series of key concepts for your site that should help to make it a better place for all those involved.

As I've written previously, I only entered the CSS game recently after years of web development experience. However, over the past three months I have learned much about site design and how to make things appear the way I want. It's opened up a lot of different design options for me and has helped lead to the current design of the page.

Yet, the most important thing I have learned through the process has been the lesson of validation.

Depending on your experience with site development, you may or may not be familiar with the concept of validation. Basically, it is a check to see if different aspects of your site are consistent with the web standard specifications laid forth by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). This is important because most web browsers use these standards to display your pages. So, any web browser that is compliant with the standards should display your page in the same way as long as your page passes validation.

This is important in a time of emerging browsers. Where once there was only Internet Explorer and Netscape, we now have IE, FireFox, Opera, Konqueror and many others being used around the world. As webmasters, we can no longer afford to code to the standards of a single browser, because we may be alienating the users of another browser.

And the easiest part is that you only need your URL to perform validation.

So how can you validate your pages?

Well, there are three or four different aspects of your page that should be validated, depending on you you have things set up.

• HTML/XHTML - Otherwise known as markup, your web pages should be checked to ensure that they have proper syntax. Poor page syntax can lead to different display issues in different browsers. To validate your markup, you can use W3C's Markup Validation Service. If you're not familiar with XHTML markup, I strongly encourage you to check this post over at The Church Webmaster's Forum.
• CSS - Your CSS also needs to be validated to make sure that display elements will work in all browsers. Some browsers like IE have special CSS elements that they render with tools built into the operating system, but they're not accepted standards. To make sure you have a continuous look to your site, you should use W3C's CSS Validation Service.
• Links - One thing to always be wary about on your site is broken links. Even one bad link can spoil a user's experience, or make a section of your site unreachable. If you use W3C's Link Checker, you can discover and avoid these issues.
• Feeds - If you have an RSS and/or ATOM feed on your site, you should make sure that it does comply with the standards set forth for it. Sometimes you can make a change and not even realize you've broken your feed, so to be safe, you should regularly run it through W3C's Feed Validation Service.

All these validations should help to make the experience of a visitor to your site consistent regardless of what browser, computer or operating system they are using. It may not be the most glamourous thing to do, but it's an important step to take for any website.