No. I am really talking about W3C being irrelevant from an SEO standpoint and for the vast majority of sites from a visitor standpoint. You definitely want to avoid coding errors in your pages, for a lot of reasons. You definitely do NOT have to worry about W3C "validation", no matter what the DOCTYPE.
You are right. They changed the code again. Minstrel, you lost me. First you are talking about the W3C's devaluation of certain tags/attributes now it's just irrelevant...
That is WHY it's irrelevant. Because it has to do with the W3C's suggested recommendations (NOT standards) - it has nothing to do with whether the code itself is valid, i.e., error free.
But the code has to "validate" not "standardsate". The code must be in a particular form and fashion, but that does not mean standards - that would be up to the developer. The standards come out of the reccomendations, not the other way around. And as long as you meet those recomendations, your code will validate. IMO standards are more a way of being than a how-to. So, again, I'm lost in your point...
Google doesnt need to optimise itself to be crawled by search engine bots Perhaps thats why they dont care about validation The fact that Google doesnt cofrim to the strict standards laid out in W3C is becuase they want to cater to as wide a demograpgic as possible, they dont want to block any of their services to any web browser no matter how out of date. It would just be a huge commercial problem for them to go to full Standards Compliant and risk browser issues and alienating a certain number of users. Even if these browser issues could be cleared up quickly with the sheer volume of searches performed on Google everyday they would hate to loose even a small percentage to another engine. This brings me on to another point. In my capacity as a Professional Web Designer it is my understanding (as Minstrel quite rightly points out) that the W3C remain recommendations and not common practice IMO for one defining reason . . . That reason is what us in the design industry call "The Bill Gates Headaches" Microsoft Internet Exporer doesnt support standards, until it does, fully the majority of designers would prefer to stick with the old fashioned image slices and layout tables method. There are also not many CSS visual design tools on the market and it is a steep learning curve for a designer used to working the "tried and tested way" Perhaps Standards would be adopted more readily if SEO benefits could be proved?
Great thread. Can I assume from this discussion that at least there is conclusive evidence in between valid code(w3 or otherwise) and non valid code in respect optimization of a website?
I am baffled as to what you find difficult to understand. "Valid code" means code without errors. "W3C validation" means code without errors as defined by W3C. Since not everyone agrees with how W3C defines "errors", code can be perfectly valid without being W3C validated. How can I say that in any other way?
Now I'm confused Minnie - if I'd asked you to repeat yourself a dozen times you'd have bitch slapped me across DP into another post ... Are you getting more tolerant with age or was I just inherently a pain in the ass?
Hmmm... 1. you have Toots' old avatar... did you steal it from him or had he stolen it from you? 2. you are also from San Diego... 3. you list www. sitetutor .com as your home page 4. in a former life, were you Toots' car?
No need to bitch slap me. I understood your point. I whole reason I found this post is that I was thinking about leaving out alt tags if I don't use them on an image. This would take away the w3 validation, but the code would remain valid and depending on how many images were on a particular page affect the content to code ratio. Thanks and no need to bitch slap this guy. My wife has the market on that.
wrm wasn't talking about bitch-slapping you, sansei... he was talking about that other guy above you in this thread who has been confused for about three pages. Now about that sitetutor thing... what is that about?
W3C says that you should declare an alt-tag with all images because it is part of a federal law in the U.S. for Section 508 compliance, which is part of the ADA 1965 law and its amendments. However, if it is an insignificant image such as an image spacer, it is perfectly acceptable to delcare it as <empty> or simply alt="" and this will pass W3C validation.
Minstrel will probably pick a fight with me on the fact that this article covers accesibility and SEO not valid code or even W3C valid code. It is relevant to this discussion IMO >http://alistapart.com/articles/accessibilityseo
I'm not going to "pick a fight", Walshy. I am going to point out that what he talks about in that article is basic principles of SEO. What has that to do with W3C validation (necessarily)? Indeed, the points he highlights are true even if one is not at all concerned with accessibility.
I was only joing when I said "pick a fight" my friend, I do respect your opion What I found interesting is that he is talking about a correlation between accessible (therefore standards based) design and being crawled deeper and with more frequency. Which was the point of this thread in the first place. I agree though that nothing is new in the alistapart article its just another person advocating the SEO benefits of standards/accesible web design versus tradition methods.
I read (skimmed) it as saying more that many of the features of creating accessible web pages are also just plain good SEO, like alt tags for all your images, that sort of thing.