As a web designer, who’s work is often viewed by people likely to pay attention to my source code, I’m hardly going to answer the above question with any other answer other than “YES!”. However, I’m sure I’m not alone in sometimes wondering why other, often hugely successful companies, decide not to address the issue that their web site has numerous page errors.
If the likes of Google can get away with it, why can't we?
Finding errors has never been so easy
Let’s take a mix of 3 sites I visit practically daily - Google (UK), BBC and Amazon (UK). I’m going to test them using the W3C Markup Validation Service.
Google fails, even on its minimalistic homepage – 46 errors on one of the smallest pages (Kilobits wise) you are likely to ever come across.
Being a bit of a BBC fanboy, I was hoping they wouldn’t let me down. Initially, they didn’t. The landing page had no errors, as shown by the lovely green w3c page that I myself have lately been achieving. Then I delved a bit deeper and looked at a news story. 301 errors were detected, some of them easily avoidable, others seem rather obscure.
Amazon managed an impressive 1418 errors on the page I landed on.
Surely Google has a good reason for this
My first thought about Google was that, with the astronomical amount of traffic they deal with, they may have ignored the w3c standards in order to keep the bandwidth requirements down.
However, I read an article (from 2006) that claimed the opposite. The author claimed he made the file size 21% smaller when rewriting it using an HTML 4.01 DTD.
What do I gain if I do make the effort?
So why do I bother? Well, in the past, I didn’t. I tested everything across multiple browsers and if everything looked just about pixel perfect that was good enough for me – and more than good enough a typical client and even my employers. However, now that I’m displaying my freelance work on a public website, I want to show potential employers that it is something I take seriously. I’d hope that it makes me and my clients look more professional at the same time.
Search engine optimisation is also something I take seriously and I understand that search engine spiders love to crawl through semantically correct, clean markup. As a result, it’s possible a page could appear higher in search results – perhaps more so in the future.
There is also the element of accessibility. I know there is a lot more required to making a site completely accessible for those with disabilities, but I do see it as a step in the right direction.
It also makes my sites easier to maintain. If I made a slight error when hand coding a site and then ran it through the W3C validator, that 1 error is going to stand out like a sore thumb. For many other sites I doubt they would notice their error tally has risen by 1 and so the number could continue to rise. I’ve seen many errors on popular sites that are simple to fix but perhaps they have simply gone unnoticed. One day this error may cause an inconsistency in a browser.
Perhaps it is just a ‘pride thing’
The main reason I do bother though is simply because I take pride in my work and want to do things “right”. I don’t want errors in my code the same way I don’t want spelling/grammatical errors. If somebody runs a validator through my code, which returns no errors, and simply thinks “well at least he decided to bother” – that is good enough for me.
All of the other reasons are perhaps just a bonus, but as time goes on I think conforming to web standards will be much more rewarding.
