What is the value of WW3 validation if...

[surreypcsupport]

Persue it. Upper case tags is an HTML standard not xhtml. Sounds to me like the site is written in HTML 4 transistional. In xhtml all tags need closing - even <br> should be closed in xhtml.

Having said that there are a huge amount of sites on the web that aren't compliant.

It will affect your rankings in Google. In the webmaster guidelines one of the first things that is mentioned is markup technical quality. They can only be referring to W3C standards.

It may result in issues with some browsers. But then again some browsers don't comply with xhtml 1.0. The only way to be sure is testing.

If you would like me to correct all the errors I can do so. Only a day or two work depending on the number of site pages and whether the html is generated using server side scripting. PM me if you need my help - rates are extremely competitive. Feel free to run my site through W3C compliance checking if you want proof I do what I say.

Good luck.

[surreypcsupport]

Fair enough and you are dead right to say that. Especially if you specified that all pages must be compliant with W3C standards in your service agreement. If not then this is a good example of how IT consultants can on rare occassions actually save you time/effort/money.

In any case if they have any honour at all then they should put this right for you. If they have any real technical skill then it won't take them very long either.

Good luck with it.

[BlueBoden]

I wouldn't hire any company using Dreamweaver to create their pages, especially not if the code wouldn't validate.

[surreypcsupport]

Using Dreamwaever itself isn't the problem. I would recomend using dreamweaver for creating tables and adding hyperlinks etc simply because it's quicker than typing it all out.

What you need to remember though is that Dreamweaver may leave unclosed tags if you add and then remove stuff. So long as you edit your markup at the end of the development and correct any parse errors then using Dreamweaver is fine.