[WSG]

[Elle Meredith]

Shlomi Asaf wrote: Hi I have a question that crossed my mind, and i wish to get help from you guys: HTML Validation- what is it good for? I try to find the disadvantages of a non validated site against one validated, and let me try to explain what i mean. If i build a website, according to his declaration - let say Strict XHTML, and its answering all the roles of Strict Xhtml, but its not valid cause, for example, i haven't used "" to surround values, or i haven't closed single tags using Slash (< />), but other wise i did everything by the scheme. What can be the damage? If i open the site and see that it works on my target browsers, why i need the validation for? what do i benefit from it? It says it helps me improve my SEO, but i see all the first results at Google, for lets say "Forex" keyword, and none of them are valid. I assume the main price is time rendering cost, but what can be else? Thank You. Shlomi.A Hi Shlomi, I can definitely agree that you shouldn't take everything for granted and decide for yourself whether it is important for you to follow or not. But I think the question here is why would you choose xhtml strict? or even more why choose xhtml doctype at all? why not stay with good old html 4? If you choose xhtml because you believe that xml is the way of the future, than at least follow its rules such as enclose you attributes in "" and close all tags and so forth. Besides most editors will this automatically for you by selecting a preference of choice. And then validating just helps making sure your syntax is correct, which means if you do have problems with how your pages load if your target browsers, you can eliminate possibilities quicker and easier. If you wish to not follow the language rules, at least declare it as html and then you can leave your tags unclosed and all that other things you have to do when using xhtml strict as doctype. All the best Elle waznelle.com ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************