Do you pay attention to W3C compliance of your website pages?

[MichaelCorfman]

GPWA private member UltimatePokerBonus started a thread asking fellow webmasters How important is W3C Validation?

As that thread shows, member feelings about the importance of w3c compliance varies quite a bit. On the one hand some folks insist their sites be fully w3c compliant and on the other hand some webmasters feel it is a complete waste of time. For anyone who is curious, you can easily check for w3c compliance of any page on your website on the page validator.w3.org.

So, for this weeks poll I thought it would be interesting to find out whether webmasters pay attention to w3c compliance on their website. And it this thread, rather than debating the merits of doing it or not, which is already being discussed in the thread How important is W3C Validation? let's talk about the role testing for compliance plays in your development process. Do you use it always, sometimes, never? Do you use it as part of QA testing where you only worry about fixing serious syntax errors that might cause your site to malfunction with some browsers, or do you have a quality goal of 100% w3c compliance? And are their particular tools you use to make sure you have well formed html files?

Michael

[Nandakishore]

I have done some compliance testing but then gave up the idea of making the complete site W3C compliant because it is too time comsuming also because the compliance reports are not very user-friendly.

[baldidiot]

I have done some compliance testing but then gave up the idea of making the complete site W3C compliant because it is too time comsuming also because the compliance reports are not very user-friendly.

You can say that again!

[FictionNet]

I've heard about it but never bothered with it. My site design is ancient and my HTML would send W3C-fans into a seizure. I couldn't really care less - because it hasn't harmed my rankings as far as I know. If I thought my attitute towards W3C was harming my sites or my visitors experience then I'd probably act differently.

[vmlinuz]

I have done some compliance testing but then gave up the idea of making the complete site W3C compliant because it is too time comsuming also because the compliance reports are not very user-friendly.

Same for me. I pay attention to compliance when I do the basic design, but all the aff. codes, banners, etc. will ruin it anyways. After the site is almost completed, I check if it renders correctly in all the browsers and make adjustments. Some of these adjustments also ruin the W3C compliance.

[Chips]

I always run my pages through validation. Perhaps it is just my perfectionist traits but I feel it is important.

I have often found that even if you show 50 errors, always begin at the top and correct the 1st error, then re-check, many times one error will generate more errors. I did have one new design show 40 some errors and once I fixed the 1st one, it cleaned them all up.

As far as the reporting, if you use Dreamweaver, the line #'s will match up making it easy to locate the bad coding. And you also can tick the "Clean up with html tidy" and it will generate clean code below the errors, just cut and paste the result.

This is especially hand when you are doing an unordered or ordered list that has multiple breaks. ie topic, sub topic, sub-sub topic. That function has saved me tons of time in error chasing.

[DaftDog]

I have a new site that is a few months old and have made an effort to keep it 100% W3C compliant. I host my own banners and don't use flash banners.

Once you have the basics set up correctly it is not so difficult.

[casino2k.com]

Sometimes I check with validator, just to see if templates I'm using are really w3c compiant.
Anyway w3c validator warning and error messages are sometimes very difficult to understand, I hope they will improve it in the near future!

[BadRiver4Me]

I made some changes to get rid of some error , but the javascript errors were the ones I couldn't fix .