Like many other good web designers/developers I take reasonable care in making sure that my code works in all browsers, as well as being valid to W3C standards. The barriers to Web Design are very low and any web page can be thrown on the Internet, regardless of what is in it or how good the coding is.

Validation has actually been around for a while now, and finally many seem to realise that validation is the only real way to go about creating a web page. Accessibility and Usability standards are also being raised with some popular websites sporting great new designs that cater for all. The tide is almost starting to shift towards users that create valid code, and whilst there are still those that produce poor-quality code behind their websites we have a new breed of web designers that are taking the top jobs and are pushing the boundaries to new and innovative designs.

When validation started to rear its head the cool thing to do was to stick one of the W3C’s validation badges on your website. You may recognise them from the majority of personal and small-business web pages, but for those who’ve never seen a validation badge here’s one of them.

Back in the day our web pages wore these badges with honour and pride, but what do they really mean to those outside of Web circles? Would a client actually care if your code was, according to the W3C (whoever they are are), valid?

Only in certain circumstances.

I think it’s time that businesses drop the badge from every one of their web pages. It no longer displays dominance for a webmaster, nor does it look particularly impressive. We are at a time in the Web’s history that we should all expect a web page to be standards-compliant, without having to display a link showing that our code is valid. For the average website it is not necessary to tell users that your web pages are valid.

A good alternative to displaying a W3C badge or link to the validation page on every one of your web pages is to set up an Accessibility page for your website to explain that your page contains valid code and has been tested to ensure that everyone should be capable of viewing the content on your page. To be honest I would rather see a link to an accessibility web page than a link to another web page that tells me that a website is coded properly. Who actually cares if your web page is coded properly as long as it works for them? If you’re ficcle enough to not like a web page because of invalid code then you’d better change your search engine!

The easy barrier of entry for Web Designers is both a great thing and a terrible thing. Great because it allows talented individuals to gain work and create fantastic web pages, and terrible because a lack of true validation (i.e. a page not displaying if the code is not valid) is the reason so many web pages on the Internet look like crap and function like crap.