Designing websites is like painting a picture, you need to use the right tools and in the right sequence or it’s just a big old mess. If you don’t prime your canvas, no-one will really know, but your colours won’t be as true and vivid as they could be. The same can be said of your code.
I would hope that people check their designs on different browsers and platforms to ensure that the site looks and behaves as it should. I am not a fan of MS Internet Explorer (by any stretch of the imagination), but I acknowledge that there are still people out there who use it and so I make sure my designs work within all the IE quirks. It would be so much easier if we all used the same browser! Anyway I digress, the final step in the web design process should always be to validate the code.
Don’t get me wrong, the amount of times I have sobbed into my hot chocolate when seeing the amount of errors after running the code through the validator is too numerous to count. It’s a scary but neccessary task to do, as not only is it always a good thing to know that you are doing things the ‘right’ way, but it also makes you more aware of ‘sloppy’ coding and hopefully avoid writing it in the future.
There is a great sense of achievement when you get that green ‘validated’ message appearing on your screen and it makes it all worth while. When I can hand over the code to the client and tell them that it has all been validated, just makes it all that much better.
That’s why…
If you are feeling brave or confident, why not run your site through the validator and see for yourself? Click on the I heart validator icon above!