To what point is making an HTML page valid worth it?

Question

Since a long time ago, when I found out about the W3C Validator, I made sure every HTML document I made was valid HTML.

However, I think sometimes it just isn't necessary to waste time making it valid. Of course, for actual Internet pages may be important, but is making pages on an Intranet, or even little front-ends that are used with other programs, when the HTML page renders correctly in the most used browsers (not necessarily counting IE 6 and 7).

I think I'm mostly talking about little improvements over code, such as wrapping every shown element of the page on <p> or <div> tags.

Answer 1

It's the best practice, but it really comes down to an organizational requirement/desire. Is it important enough that standards add value for your organization? Or is it simply enough that it displays correctly? Often with intranets its the latter.

Answer 2

You may want to check out this article it lays out the problem very clearly:

http://sixrevisions.com/web-standards/problems-with-using-website-validation-services/

Answer 3

Making an HTML page "valid" is worth it if you intend to be future friendly. That is, when browsers begin to strip out deprecated or vendor specific tags, you will find your page displaying incorrectly.

Web standards are there for a reason - to ensure consistent display/output among web browsers and interpreters. Choosing to write your pages in non-compliant HTML is your decision. It is also, to take an old adage, your "funeral".

Answer 4

What happens when the browser of choice for the intranet changes? There really isn't a way to guarantee that the code you have will render correctly in EVERY browser. But in a lot of cases the browsers will be reasonably close to the standard. I think it also depends on how complex the page is because the chances it renders differently in different browsers increases as the complexity of the CSS and tag depth does. The best way is to write valid cross-browser code and test for target browsers. Its silly to think write-once and render the same everywhere is possible for all browsers. But adhering to the standards is the best way you can get close.

Answer 5

Making a page validate for its own sake is not really a business proposition. What happens for end-users (with their cranky browsers) is the real test.

That said, validating periodically will help you debug. It'll catch the more salient errors like unclosed tags. Which, in turn, does affect end-users. So treat validation like compiler warnings -- good for discipline.