Have a look at the bottom page where I have indicated that this page is VALID XHTML 1.0.
Now if you click on that link, it will redirect you to the validator site of W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) www.w3c.org indicating that this page was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional!
What does this mean?
It simply means that this page was checked against the document standards of W3C for HTML and XML-derived web document types. Although the validation is similar to a spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, it is more precise and reliable since the validation is using a precise machine language and not a tentative and at times ambiguous human language.
Website owners and webmasters should strive to have their webpages XTML valid.
With the preponderance of browsers, each having their own quirks and idiosyncracies, having valid pages means that your pages are not relying on the error-correction facilities of a browser. According to W3C, “this error correction can and does vary radically across different browsers and versions, so that many authors who unwittingly relied on the quirks of Netscape 1.1 suddenly found their pages appeared totally blank in Netscape 2.0.”
So how do you make your webpages XHMTL valid and thus will make your webpages display consistently across web browsers?
We will discuss that next.
Meantime, just out of curiosity, enter an address in the validation box at http://validator.w3c.org. Let’s enter http://microsoft.com and see if the homepage of this technology giant is XHTML valid.
At the time that we checked Microsoft against W3C standards, the homepage of Microsoft showed 176 errors and 36 warnings.
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Hi Romy. This is quite revealing. I mean, about Microsoft. I guess it does not matter to them whether their website meets W3C standards or not. Ric
Ric – Thanks for the feedback. Yes, pick up any major website and you’ll know what I mean.