Does Google Care About Valid HTML

ByWalter Wimberly

Periodically people will try to argue about should they have valid HTML for their websites. Some argue that you should always validate.

But does it really matter?

Imagine a web browser that could only view valid HTML websites. What would it view?

We’ll I’ve read in times past that over 80% of all web pages have one or more errors on it – yet almost all of those pages can be read by a web browser.

Would you use a web browser that could only view 20% of the web, at most? Of course not! Web browsers, and the spiders that search engines use, are notoriously good at figuring out those errors, and fixing it so it can read the web pages.

So while valid HTML is extremely important as it will make display faster, make your code more maintainable, and easier to hand off to other people, it isn’t something you should overly worry about if you can make the page appear in your major browsers correctly.

 

Does Google Care About Valid HTML was originally found on Access 2 Learn

Assistant Professor

Walter Wimberly is an Assistant Professor at a regional college in Tennessee, teaching Computer Science in the Software Engineering track. He works as a student advisor, oversees curriculum changes, develops new courses, and manages the advisory panel.
Walter taught full time for about 7 years, before going back into “industry” as a full stack Software Developer for a dozen years. There he focused on web based projects coding in JavaScript/jQuery and utilizing the Bootstrap CSS Framework on the front-end, and coding in PHP, ASP/ASP.Net, SQL on the back-end.

Since he loves teaching, he taught as an adjunct web and digital media classes for eight (8) years, while working in industry, and has since returned to teaching full time.

He has been married for over 25 years, and is father to several special needs boys. As such, he is working on some projects to help others who have special needs to be self-sufficient, and support the care givers of those with special needs. Check out his Autism blog for more info.

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