How important is validation of code?

Before I knew anything about validation, a couple of years back in the early days, coding worked fine and I was only looking at my website with Internet Explorer. Then a friend told me to try out Mozilla Firefox, and I did. To my surprise my webpages looked all distorted and crappy in Firefox, and I went all confused and tried to search the net for some solution to this newly found problem. Instead of some quick-fix, I found out that it was my coding that was all wrong and I needed to validate my code at the www.w3.org website. Oh man! I think I found about 250 errors in my index-page only!

So I found this great Swedish article tutorial (Webdesignskolan), that helped me understand the use of doctype declarations, and validation. Today I try to validate all my coding because I know that the number of Mozilla-users have increased, and I like my page to be viewed correctly by all visitors.

Validating your code means loosing some functions

Yes, using the correct htmlcode according to www.W3.org means using less java-script, no nestled tables and so on, but it's worth it in my oppinion. You get a site that loads correctly in all browsers, and I've even heard that the search-engines like it even more!

So don't waste time on difficult coding that messes things up, visit the validator and get it done clean. Only then will your website work on its fullest potential in what ever its suppose to do.

So get out there and get one of these for your site!