Do you remember the last time you validated your HTML? If you are a seasoned web developer or have been a developer for more than 12 years, you will remember how it was done.
Going back to 15 years ago, it was very common to see “Valid HTML” and “Valid CSS” links at the bottom of the websites. This was meant for people to demonstrate their skills, ensure that the page would work on all browsers, and also support the web standards. There were a lot of benefits that came with the obsession with the validation of web pages. However, we have lost our ways where old developers don’t care and new developers don’t know. And, if old developers don’t care, new developers don’t see it as relevant to them.
The Validation service was one of the requirements “back in the day,” and I think should be used more frequently in our projects. At least for developers with less than five years of experience. Don’t trust any school or company that tells you that you will be a front-end developer, web developer, or a developer in general for the web in just a matter of months. It takes a lot of trial and error and the use of the HTML validator to learn proper HTML.
Why Using the W3C Validator?
By testing our code with the W3C validator, we can find mistakes and errors with suggestions on how to solve the problems. In addition, the messages provided by the tool contributed to a deeper understanding of HTML and CSS. Also, it helps us to find issues that we overlooked that could affect the layout like unclosing tags or how accessible the page could be, by pointing out the images that did not have an alt attribute.
Finally, I hope this tool becomes popular again because it will be beneficial for new developers. They will learn quickly how to solve common errors in their code. and it will serve as a companion when learning HTML.