The importance of being HTML valid

Recently, I had to remake my project, so it could be correctly displayed to all browsers. Since it was meant to be presented to 5-6 people, I didn’t care about IE compatability. The website was developed in Dreamweaver CS4, tested on Firefox and Chrome, where the display was the exact same as the design.

When the project was released to the public, I hooked a Google Analytics code, to keep track of any random visitors. A couple of visitors were using IE 6.0, which has the most problems considering compatability. It seems that IE cannot repair broken tags or unable to understand some css.

A safe way to make sure that the page is viewed properly is to be HTML valid, by the rules of w3c standards. Some benefits of having an HTML valid website:

1. The layers are displayed properly in all browsers Scrap that – IE 6.0 has many CSS incompatabilities – even if you are 100% CSS valid.
2. The compiling time is decreased – therefore making the site load a bit faster
3. It’s shows that the site is done professionally

The tactic that is more effective is to try to fix one error at a time. A missing tag is probable to fix any errors following. e.g. if you ommit the </head> tag,  the errors that follow it considering tags are dissapeared.

Also: Fill the alt tag in your images. It also counts as an error.

Plus: Give your scripts the “type”. Some of the scripts that are distributed freely like  Twitter, tend not to include the “type=”text/javascript” atrribute.