Validating HTML is generally considered to be like checking your documents for spelling errors. It will check your HTML code and make sure that it’s accurate and will render correctly in a live browser. Many web designers do not chose to validate their html however. This could be because HTML validators are often hard to use; especially for beginning website designers. They can often give you errors and bad results; leaving you to believe your code is wrong when it isn’t.
Everyone makes mistakes when creating code. It’s basically a second language and as with any learned second language, mistakes will be made. You can use online validators to check the accuracy of your HTML code. They are free to use and are often kept up to date more so than the ones you have to purchase and install onto your computer. One such online validation site is validator.w3.org. This site is run by W3C. They control and regulate what is and isn’t considered HTML. In order to use this service you need only to enter the address of the web page or upload the HTML file if they website is not live yet. You will then get a display of all the errors and problems found in your HTML code. Once you have fixed your code you can enter it again to make sure you have fixed all of your errors.
Some of the errors can be confusing though. It can be hard to tell what the error codes mean; especially if you’re new to website designing. Some people get stranded trying to fix your HTML code because they do not know what these errors codes mean. If you do not know what the problem is; you cannot fix it. Below is a list of some of the most frequent problems you will encounter with HTML code and their meanings.
- Missing DOCTYPE: What this means is that the code is missing the document type declaration. This should be in the first line of the code.
- Missing closing tags: This means that some of the tags inside the code you created have not been properly closed; leaving the code open.
- Improper nesting of HTML tags: This means you didn’t close the tags in the proper order.
There are many more errors that you will encounter but slowly you will gain an insight into what they all mean.