Where is your sticker? The validation of HTML, CSS and RSS is a legal p roof of good coding of your Website. Whether someone or search engine do not consider it, but we should consider it ourselves to have a good, modularized and optimized code. The modularized and optimized code runs faster than others and anyone can upgrade it easily in future.

I shudder to think that if we developers and designers down play the importance of standardization, or if we fail to promote the importance of a common standard, browser developers will no longer hold it as a top priority. Then who loses? We do. Web designers and web developers will once again be forced to hack our way through evil browsers and applications. We’ve made too much progress to let it slip now.

This war is far from over though. We need to continue putting pressure on companies like Google, Yahoo, and other non-compliant operators just like we did Microsoft.

Using your analogy, standards only matter to the degree that it affects your particular site. However, long-term some of those sites will likely break due to lax validation practices. As browsers and apps are upgraded and improved there’s no way to predict how a non-compliant site will hold up tomorrow, next week, or next millennium.

The mall analogy doesn’t hold up because a poorly structured building could collapse and actually kill people. A website can’t kill someone, nor will it collapse because of a few validation errors. If it displays perfectly across the major browsers then it’s good to go. A more accurate analogy would be saying that as long as the mall has foot traffic and makes money it doesn’t matter if the paneling it six inches wide or four inches wide or the doors swing outward or inward. Most validation is about as important.

I’m also not trying to convince myself of anything. Most of my sites validate and it means nothing really. That’s not why my clients make money. And making money is all that matters to my clients.

That’s why I said validation is a worthy goal but I certainly wouldn’t get all fussy about some lame errors that really don’t mean anything.

Saying that validation isn’t important to your site is like saying that structural integrity doesn’t matter as long as the shopping mall has lots of foot traffic is making money.

Ridiculous. Validation is only part of the overall quality and success of a website, but you can’t discount the importance of that single step. As we designers work to improve decades of bad habits and browser compatibility, it’s extremely important to get on board with standards as much as possible.

There are still some problems with W3C, but we’ve made huge progress in recent years and your article does nothing to advance that objective.

I admit that not all of my sites validate perfectly for one reason or another, but trying to get as close as possible is important. I think you’re trying to convince yourself that validation is no big deal, but in the long run you’re only fooling yourself.

Thanks for the article. It’s important to keep this dialog going, and everybody’s opinion matters.