As time passes, validated HTML documents will become a key aspect of Web life to ensure document portability. The bottom line is that if you want your company information to look good using the new browsers that are coming out and you want to be able to use all the new tools that are being made available then it is important to stick to the specs.
Current browsers tend to play it fast and loose because early users of the system have expected things to "just work" and therefore they do not make good validation tools. At least one new browser entering the scene has a "Bad HTML" flag that pops up on non-conformant documents.
As more and more tools enter the marketplace they will not all parse non-conformant documents in the same way (e.g., already, the graphical HTML authoring tool HotMetaL will not load invalid documents) and it will fall upon the document author or maintainer to fix them (possibly by hand).
The wider the array of tools you plan to have at your disposal (and there are a bewildering number of them in the works) the more conformant your documents will need to be. If you don't want to get stuck down the road with 10,000 HTML documents that are not acceptable to some great new tool then you need to write conformant documents now.
One user writes:
We started with some simple pages some 6 month ago done at home on a PC. These pages would display more or less ok with the version of mosaic we had then on the PCs , Mac and the Suns but not exacly the same.. When I moved these pages to the Sun and stared to use HotMetal I had to spend hours hacking the pages to get them to load and a second round of hacking was needed before I could save any changes.
The web is really all about reusable content. That means that in contrast with old-style databases (for example, Microsoft Encarta(tm)) that are restricted to the one interface that the authors could envision; people can write programs and interfaces that interact with your data in ways that you might never have thought of. This feature of reuse increases the usefulness of good content many hundred fold.
Some good examples of reusable resources:
If you have good content but a programmer with humble resources cannot parse it then it is of little use to the world except as your little personal trophy on the web. There are many freely available tools for parsing SGML documents and if documents are written to conform to the HTML spec then every programmer that wants to create a new tool will be able to do so with ease. They could just pick up one of the freely available SGML parsing tools and the HTML DTD and they would be all set and they could concentrate on solving problems instead of reinventing the wheel again and again as Netscape would have us do.
In stark contrast to this, the internals of the Netscape parser are proprietary. That means that whenever you write invalid HTML documents you are just making it that much harder for anyone else to write tools that will work with your documents.
Of course, just running your document through a validation tool is not enough to guarantee that it is well designed but it is a very important step on the road to the reliable communication of your ideas for today and tomorrow.
For some details, see the HTML Bad-Style page.
See also the Why-Validate Informal Survey Results.
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Tony Sanders;
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Last Updated: October 3, 1995