January 8th, 2013
Whether you're already aware or not, there is such a thing as a valid website and an invalid one. You can tell whether or not your site is valid by plugging it into the W3C's validator tool:
http://validator.w3.org/
Is your site valid? It should be, here's my story.
I was one of those programmers who didn't care much about validation, in fact, I thought that trying to achieve validation was a foolish concept. My perception was that the validation service wanted me to jump through a bunch of hoops - and for no good reason. I figured that if my code worked and looked right in Firefox and IE, my job was done. Plus, let's face it - validation is boring. Everyone wants to walk into their boss' office and describe how they saved the world - or designed something really cool that will save the company. With validation, it's generally a labor of hate. You're pushed to the limits as code you thought was fine turns out to be invalid, and now you've got to spend hours (or more) coming up with another solution to a problem that works, but has errors - BORING! So, for a while I went on my merry non-validating coder way, until I saw the light.
My conversion came in the form of a book. I don't remember the title or author(s) right now but they were talking about validation and how it's proper programming. It wasn't until they explained why you should validate that the importance of it finally sank in. So, without further ado, here's the goods:
When you pull up a webpage in your browser of choice, if the page has errors, the browser attempts to fix these. Now, some simply cannot be fixed, but still browswers are generally - as my college professor stated: "very forgiving". To dig a bit deeper, while the browser gets all the credit, the real worker bee is your computer's cpu. Yes, him again. We simply can't get along without him and owe him big. Now, if you've got a decent machine with a pretty powerful cpu, it won't take long for these fixes to be done. However, mobile devices such as phones, tablets, etc..., don't have the cpu capability your laptop or desktop does, which leads to...
Now that most of web browsing is done via a mobile device, it's prudent to make your website friendly toward them. Having a valid site is important to gaining this friendship. If your site is slow to load on mobile devices - due to invalid webpages - the user is going to leave your site and give their attention to a more deserving site.
While validating a website can be at times annoying and unhip, it's critical to the success of the site that the "unglorious" work of website validation be done so that users can experience the "glorious" aspects of the site due to it's quick load time now that the errors have been removed.
By the way, I generally don't bother with the validator's warnings - I fix the errors and move along.