Here are the five most important tenets to keep in mind when building high-quality Web applications. I won’t go into standards compliance here, because that topic has already been debated to death, and the conclusions are old news now. Instead, let’s review the modern tendencies applied in high-quality Web applications:
When writing HTML by hand, these are the most common mistakes that lead to invalid HTML or XHTML:
I’ve been talking regularly about the importance of HTML/XHTML validation in Web pages and blogs.
Well, now, there’s a new reason… or, actually, it’s a pretty old one. Section 508 of the US Rehabilitation Act makes a few requirements for public Web sites and blogs, to improve accessibility for their users.
thTeong WebLog|Blog About Everything asks whether validation is important.
Here’s my take on the issue: it’s very important.
If your content does not validate, your RSS feeds might be broken as well. Most feed readers will barf when fed broken XML/XHTML. That means fewer readers.
Validation is also important in another sense: when you focus on validation, you inevitably end up doing somethign about semantics in your markup. Everyone benefits from this, especially you, the author, because Google and other search engines benefit from semantic markup.
Plus, broken HTML/XHTML may render in unpredictable ways with different browsers. XHTML-based blogs may not even render under certain circumstances (we’re talking about the famous application/xml+html content type here). I don’t suppose you’d want to harm your readers’ reading experiences, do you?
To help you in your thankless task of ensuring that your WordPress blog always remains valid HTML/XHTML, I’ve written a special plug-in for it: the WordPress XHTML validator. Download it today!
By the way, thanks for the reference link, thTeong!