Citrus Skies

Why Validate?

In 2005, one software manufacturer announced that it had ‘shipped’ its one billionth internet browser.

No, it wasn’t Microsoft.

Nor was it Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox, in any of its guises.

In fact this company doesn’t even make internet browsers for PCs (or Macs).

The company was Openwave and although most people won’t be familiar with the name, they’re just one company in the rapidly growing sector of the Wireless Internet, manufacturing internet browsers for mobile phones.

The Internet is constantly evolving. You don’t know who will access your web site, from where or how. Its no longer reasonable to assume that your visitors will all be using the same kind of devices, never mind the same make of internet browser (which, unbelievably, still seems to be the approach taken by some web designers). However, you can take steps to ensure that your web site will be usable on as many of these devices as possible.

Validating your web site against the Web Standards is one such step. The World Wide Web Consortium provide a set of handy tools that allow you to quickly check your site’s validity and provide suggestions to correct any errors that may be found.

Knowing that your web site is ‘valid’ not only gives you that warm feeling inside, it also gives you peace-of-mind that your web site does not contain any proprietary code, which might work well in one internet browser, only to break your site when viewed in another browser.

The Citrus Skies site displays its validation links for XHTML and CSS at the bottom of every page, not to show off the fact that we write valid code (though we do) but rather to prompt our visitors to think about validating their own sites and perhaps even the web sites belonging to other web design firms.