Top blogs fail W3C markup validation

I just read an article entitled “Top blogs fail W3C Markup Validation”. While the result doesn’t come as a surprise at all, it is still sad to see it confirmed once again since validation is not rocket science.

Validation is a simple way to check whether the web page is built in accordance with web standards. This will help with search engine rankings and increase the user experience. It also is essential to minimize cross-browser problems and making sure that the page is mobile-friendly.

The W3C Markup Validation Service can easily be used to validate online markup as well as snippets (simply copy your markup into a form). If you need batch validation, it’s available through the WDG HTML Validator or Nikita. There’s also a neat validation extension for Firefox.

And while you’re at it, validate your CSS as well.

Please note that validating your code is only the first step. Think of it as spell-checking a document. Even though the spelling is correct, it can still be filled with a lot of garbage.