Nice2All.com

The day before yesterday I had a quick look at 30 randomly selected blogs plus 4 of the bigger social sites. I checked the validity of the markup on the front pages of all these sites. I was expecting a high percentage of sites not to have valid code but I was not quite prepared for the results of the actual test.

Of the 30 sites I chose at random, 29 failed the validation test. The one site that passed was actually a site that concentrates on website accessibility (not my own). The total number of HTML errors for the 30 sites was 1611, giving an average of just under 54 errors per site.

4 of the sites used in the test were from so-called A-listers. All 4 these sites failed the test. In total these 4 sites had 440 HTML errors, giving an average of 110 errors per site. This is quite a bit higher than the average for the lesser known sites.

I also had a look at 4 of the social sites that I know well or are currently using. I had a look at the front pages of Digg, Entrecard, Plurk, StumbleUpon and Twitter. Guess what, they all failed the validation tests. In total these sites had 86 HTML errors. Their average is just under 22 which is quite a bit less than the others.

Getting your HTML code to validate is sometimes quite a chore but it is so necessary. If the HTML code does not validate it is extremely difficult to meet any of the accessibility standards but this is by no means the only problem. Just why should we ensure that our code validates?

• If your code is not valid the Search Engines cannot index your pages correctly.
• Valid code renders a lot faster than its invalid counterpart.
• Invalid markup might not be compatible with future browsers.
• Non compliant markup means that your pages are not viewable in the same way within the different browsers. This is normally referred to as WYSINWOG (what you see is not what others get).
• Having a site with dynamic content is not an excuse for not having valid code. It is more than possible and also not so difficult to do.

I think I will close with that old cliche. Write it right the first time and write it once. Write it wrong and you will be writing it again.

What about your site, is the markup valid or is your site included in the thirty odd I tested?

These posts might be related:

1. Validating your CSS
2. Avoiding errors when validating XHTML
3. Total Validator
4. Has the Errata actually changed anything?
5. Help yourself as well as others