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(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
I’m sure a lot of people won’t think this one is relevant, but my experience says it is.
You know what HTML is, right? Most of you probably do. You don’t have to know it to have a blog, though, especially if you use a service like Blogger or LiveJournal – they mostly take care of the hard work. That’s why blogging is for everyone, not just “computer people”.
Still, it won’t take a lot of time or work to ensure your blog – every part of it – is made of valid HTML. I’ll talk about the advantages of it in a moment.
How to validate it? Well, it just so happens that the World Wide Web Consortium, which develops and maintains all those nice standards like HTML, XHTML and such, has a nice HTML validator. Come on, try it. Just open that link, type the address of your blog in the first box, click on “Check”, and wait a couple of seconds.
If it validated, great! But it probably didn’t, right? Well, check the errors, it usually explains what the problem was. If you use one of those blogging services, they usually have their own parts well coded, so maybe it’s something you wrote, like a malformed link, a tag (like <a> or <p>) you forgot to close, an image link (<img>) without an “alt="something"” description, or possibly some code you copied from a badly designed page (maybe created with FrontPage or some other horror). Correct those if you can – like I said, it’s not a lot of time or work, and, when fixed, it stays fixed. If you really can’t correct some error, ask a more technical friend – if he’s good and cares about doing things right, he’ll beam with pleasure and say something like “I wish more people cared about this, you don’t believe what I have to put up with”. 
A tip: a lot of blogging-related sites give you code to put links or banners to them. Some of them are fine, but others give non-validating code. With experience, you can spot them easily. For instance, maybe they don’t put values between quotes (width=50% (wrong) instead of width="50%" (right)). The validator will warn you of those, but you will be able to easily see them by yourself, and fix them, after a while.
Why is this important?
You may say something like my blog shows up fine in my Internet Explorer, so why all this work to fix errors I can’t even see?. Maybe you can’t, but it’s very likely that other people can. People with other browsers like Firefox or Opera, people with other systems like MacOS or Linux. Even the next version of Internet Explorer may be (we can only hope) more demanding about valid code, and then your blog won’t be seen as you intend it to.
Besides, people are increasingly browsing the web with devices other than a PC or a Mac. Cell phones, Blackberries, PDAs, Sony PSPs… and you almost surely can’t test your site on all of those. But respecting standards ensures all of them can display, and navigate around, your site, properly.
If a couple of minutes of work mean that your blog can be seen correctly by 100% of users instead of 85%, why not take the time to do it right?
Also, it’s not just a question of browsers. Your blog will probably have an RSS feed (I’ll talk about those later in this series), and guess what, it’s generated from the HTML code. And those, being in XML, are much stricter – a simple error usually means that feed readers refuse your feed, marking it as invalid.
And search engine bots? Well, they interpret HTML too. Maybe they won’t “eat up” some invalid code that Internet Explorer did.
Lastly (and this one is mostly a personal opinion), you should take pride in whatever you do. Even something you do just for fun. If there’s a right way and a lazy way, choose the right way. Bad HTML is like bad spelling – sure, most people will understand what you meant, but…
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Tags: Blogging, Blogging tips
I got 7 errors of gobble-dee-gook, so I’m holding off until DH can look at it
I’m actually going to bookmark this page, which has the link to the html validator, and look at it tomorrow. Final puppy count 9! *faint*
[...] (WARNING: you really should read, at least, #3 – valid HTML and #4 – making your blog search engine-friendly before you do this one) [...]
I did go to the HTML validator. They reported 832 errors on my page. I think I’m sorry I went there. Does the fact that I’m using a Mac have anything to do with this do you think?
Camille
ps…by the way, I’m enjoying your site. Thanks for the tips!