By thomasmeadows on

I have a website, the first I have made using Drupal, http://www.colabing.com. I am trying to make my site 'XHTML 1.0 Strict' compatible using http://validator.w3.org. I am using a zen sub theme for maximum compatibility. I have never done this before and was able to discern some of the errors and get them cleaned up. I noticed some people do not code their programs to 'XHTML 1.0 Strict' so I have had to re-code some modules. I have a couple of questions regarding this.

1)Is their such a thing as a perfect XHTML 1.0 Strict website? I notice even if I try to validate major websites like yahoo or ebay they do not validate correctly.

2)Does it really help Search Engine Optimization(SEO)the closer to perfect 'XHTML 1.0 Strict' you are?

3)Is their any kinds of guides specifically to help correct all of the error messages from the validator for Drupal?

4)Is trying to make my site perfectly 'XHTML 1.0 Strict' compatible a waste of my time?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

dnewkerk’s picture

dnewkerk commented

You should not ever recode a module. If you really want to change the HTML output, you need to look for either a template file included with the module (which you can copy to your theme and modify there), or if not then learn how to use theme function overrides (and hopefully the module at least properly uses theme functions). If not there is nothing you can do besides submit a request in the module's issue queue to ask that they fix it in the next version (or better, provide a simple patch for them). If you edit the module directly then you will have trouble upgrading in the future.

1) Possibly, though the more fancy stuff on the site, the less likely. Also when it comes to how to spend their developer's time, I'm sure Yahoo/etc are only willing to go so far to get perfect validation.

2) No it does not help at all to be "strict". Clean semantic code is desirable in that it offers leaner/cleaner markup and proper use of markup can communicate better to the spider about what the content is. Certainly Google isn't going to validate your code when they spider your site... they are after the content; if your semantically correct (which doesn't mean strict validation) markup gives additional/helpful meaning to the content, then all the better of course. However Matt Cutts from Google recently said even old table layouts do not matter to Google... it knows what to do and doesn't care if your code is pristine or not. See Matt's videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp

3) Drupal core itself outputs compliant markup. The theme you use however, and any modules may not produce strict output. How (and whether) to correct them would depend on the source of the issues.

4) Most likely, yes. It's a good goal to strive for of course but there's no problem for SEO if it does not, and no tangible benefit (to SEO) between transitional or strict.

thomasmeadows’s picture

thomasmeadows commented

thanks for the info....

unfortunately, as far as editing modules, some people do not code modules in a way that is user friendly. Making it to where editing them is the only option because of a lack of template files...I know you really shouldn't, but I do not know how to do it any other way. And I don't mean completely re-code. Just add or edit a div or two. Though it sounds like from what your saying the edits I did don't matter too much anyways. I was worried about getting better code for search engines.