Valid HTML code is very important because it helps accessibility in the ever-growing market of platforms and user agents, such as smartphones, tablets, the Android browser, and more. It also helps show professionalism and good practice, aids in debugging and preparing for the future.
Languages and Rules
Web pages are written in the HTML language and the current version is HMTL 5. Each language has its own syntax and therefore every document written in the HTML language is supposed to follow its official rules.
The established rules define how the syntax can be used, in what order the language can be written, and how it all fits together. For example, a web page will always start with the opening HTML tag and end with the closing HTML tag. Among these tags is the main tag and the body tag. The body tag comes after the head tag.
Rules also specify how certain syntaxes work and how they shouldn’t work. In an HTML list, use a block-level element, such as a ” tag.
What is valid HTML code?
Valid code is HTML code that follows these rules set by the W3C and is called “valid code.” This is because the code is formatted correctly, according to the standards created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Any code that is not in the correct format is called invalid code. Invalid code can be the result of typing errors or HTML code that was once valid but is now out of date. For example, the tag “” for bold is invalid and is replaced by the tag ““.
Why should you, as a designer, validate your code?
The main reason designers should be strongly encouraged to check their code and use validation services such as W3C’s own HTML Validation Tool is for accessibility reasons.
With the advent of web browsers on tablets, smartphones, gaming consoles, and televisions, it has become nearly impossible to predict what your website will look like. Any incorrect HTML can create a browser error or prevent your document from working in a particular browser. This will then convert any audience.
For example, if you are running a social media campaign and plan to post a story to Digg and most Digg users use Safari or Firefox. If your website doesn’t load properly due to bad code or poor CSS formatting, your story won’t get attention and you’ll miss out on the potential of hundreds of organic editorial links.
Validated code is simply more predictable and makes it easier for Internet browsers and assistive technologies to present websites and their content in an accessible way.
Other reasons to validate your HTML code
Validation is a sign of professionalism.
Today, there is little certification for Web professionals beyond NVQ levels and computer and information technology-related degrees. Many web designers up to now have to learn by themselves. Experienced designers can take pride in creating web content using well-formed branding. Validation can then be used as a quick check to determine if the code is the clean work of an experienced HTML author or a quickly assembled tag soup. Therefore, validation can differentiate you as a designer from others and show you as the professional to hire.
Validation helps teach good practices.
Many professionals have been building the Web with HTML and CSS since the beginning and will know these technologies by heart. Beginners and students will find automated checking tools invaluable for detecting errors and will be a good introduction to broader and more complex quality concepts such as accessibility.
Validation as a debugging tool
While many contemporary web browsers do an increasingly good job of parsing even the worst “tag soup” of HTML, some bugs aren’t always found. Quite often, different programs on different platforms will not handle such errors as easily.
Using standard markup and style sheets gives you a much better chance of having your web page and website be handled consistently across all platforms and user agents. In fact, most developers building web applications know that reliable scripting requires User-Agents to parse the document without any unexpected errors, and will make sure its markup and CSS are validated before creating an interactive layer. enriched
Validation as future-proof quality control
Verifying that a page displays correctly in various contemporary web browsers can be a reasonable guarantee that the page will work today, but it does not guarantee that it will work tomorrow. Internet browsers change and new versions appear all the time. Everyone who accessed the Web will be using a different browser that is older or newer than your version.
Validation is one of the easiest ways to check whether a page has been built according to web standards, and provides one of the most reliable guarantees that future web platforms will handle it as designed.