Google says that valid HTML code is a quality signal

[djbaxter]

Validation: measuring and tracking code quality
Google Webmaster Central
Monday, July 18, 2011

In this post we won?t talk about all the different tests that can be run to analyze a website; instead we?ll just talk about HTML and CSS validation, and tracking quality over time.

Why does validation matter? There are different perspectives on validation?at Google there are different approaches and priorities too?but the Webmaster Team considers validation a baseline quality attribute. It doesn?t guarantee accessibility, performance, or maintainability, but it reduces the number of possible issues that could arise and in many cases indicates appropriate use of technology.

While paying a lot of attention to validation, we?ve developed a system to use it as a quality metric to measure how we?re doing on our own pages. Here?s what we do: we give each of our pages a score from 0-10 points, where 0 is worst (pages with 10 or more HTML and CSS validation errors) and 10 is best (0 validation errors). We started doing this more than two years ago, first by taking samples, now monitoring all our pages.

Read more...

 

[giggleberries]

Interesting article and the mention of W3C reminded me of the importance of also designing web sites for people with disabilities and to enable the use of user assisted technology.