W3 Validator Importance

I'm curious as to how significant the W3 Validator is to all of you web designers. For the first time, I'm using it to check my web page and I'm gettling all kinds of messages, such as telling me I can't use the <font> anchor after the <pre> anchor. What's with that? I test my sites with IE, Netscape, and Mozilla (97% of my visitors use these browsers) and they always come out fine.

Do any of you actually care about the validation or should it be taken with a grain of salt? Thanks.

Tim

There is a small free program that will fix everything on your page so it is compliant. It's called HTMLTidy and you simply run your file through it and it tidies it up and give you the complete output to then paste into your document. Voila!!

It is vitally important - especially as we move into a more compliant era of standards and accessibility. It's kind of like taking your car for a tune-up & service. You don't want to pull out of the garage and find your wheels fall off :/ It is still optional at the moment but highly recommended to validate your pages. You won't get told off if you don't (except maybe by folks in forums like this one). It depends how seriously you take the profession of web design & development I guess. One thing I do get peeved is how Flash doesn't validate without resorting to all kinds of hacks. I take that with a grain of salt.

How about this....I validated my template, cleaning up about 169 errors in the process. The code, obviously, was much tighter and the pages more stable as a result. Then I proceeded to add content to the template, thinking, I really ought to validate this page before I go on, but said to myself, what the hell, it's already validated. Then I proceeded to build forty pages with 300 images. When I went back to validate the first page, I found all 40 pages had serious glitches. Fixing them is going to cost me about 10 hours.

That's my story and why I will never proceed with abandon again before validating.

Ed

I agree with Paul on the importance, though Flash can validate if you play around with the code a bit (flash satay).
If you are a professional web developer, then I would say it is highly important - all about standards and quality and accessability : although the mobile browsing market is quite small at the moment, expect it to grow - malformed html a) looks bad or b) doesn't work on handhelds. In additon, correctly formed and well written html will render faster that badly coded stuff.

If those arguments don't convince you then think of your pages from the search engines point of view. Read this page carefully and you'll see that well formed pages with clean, technically correct markup have a better chance of getting properly indexed with the search engines.

I'll throw my voice into the chorus as well. Writing valid and accessible code reduces the chances you'll have to spend frustrating hours re-designing a site that was 'glitchy' in the lastest browser update.

I use the WDG validator more than the one on the W3C site as it will validate your entire site at one time.

Not to mention the benefits of cross browser compatibility.

I wasn't even aware of all of these new posts. Guess I should have checked the e-mail reply.

I have begun using the Validator on a regular basis (wasn't aware of the WDG Validator; thanks 'NotGoddess').

I am noticing constant errors with Flash games I have on the site. I've not paid attention to those as of yet because I don't even know Flash. Mostly it's with "src", "width", and "height" elements. They're games I obtained for free. I do have to admit, it's nice to have the little validated images at the bottom of my pages. Plus, it's helping me learn (2 months learning HTML, PHP, CSS, all at once).