Markup Validation Issue

[marknc]

I've been using the W3C Markup Validation Service to check my web pages. When I ran the check on the acatalog index page I got quite a few errors and warnings. I don't really want to go into all of these just now but some initial help might go a long way to solving most if not all of these.
Mostly they are undefined elements or "no system identifiers" for various entities.

One example is the very first error:
Attribute "VALUE" is not a valid attribute. Did you mean "value"?
…ions</TITLE><Actinic:BASEHREF VALUE="http://www.madaboutjewellery.com/acatalo
Does BASEREF VALUE have to be in capitals for example?

I have searched the Knowledge Base and this forum for clues but there's not much about it. If anyone can give me a few pointers on this I would be most grateful.
Mark

[leehack]

Ignore it and spend the time on seo, noone passes, noone ever has and noone ever will, it's simply not possible with actinic as actinic has its own tags amongst other things. Seriously worry no more about it, forget it and move on.

[jont]

As Lee says this is a futile task and you are really better spending time doing other jobs (even if it is mowing the lawn) - compliance is largely for the web owner and 100% of buyers do not care if it validates or not.

It is worth running the validation as it can throw up issues that can be fixed - typically fudged HTML - but leave the Actinic stuff alone.

[marknc]

Cool!
I'm kind of glad you both said that. So you don't think it's part of SEO, that Google and other search engines are likely to rank you better if your code is compliant?
Mark

[grantglendinnin]

W3C Validation is very unlikely to increase your search rankings. Sure, there are some 'code' things you can do that will - code to content ratio, for example.

Read the W3C Policy and you'll realise how much of a fool you have been to put it on all your sites - it's only a gimmick

[leehack]

Cool!
I'm kind of glad you both said that. So you don't think it's part of SEO, that Google and other search engines are likely to rank you better if your code is compliant?
Mark

Unless you are thinking of leaving actinic for some other software, there is no real point in worrying about it, you can't validate, period. There are multi million pound actinic stores out there which are miles away from validating. Seriously forget it and move on. Put google through the validator, see what happens .

[cbarling]

As a general principle, I would agree that standards are good. However, the only time that validation seems to come up in the Actinic context is when a web designer uses it as a (IMO opinion lazy and deceptive) way of criticising Actinic stores.

Actinic doesn't validate for two reasons:

- we use some tags which don't validate. However these tags are ignored by every browser so they are completely immaterial. We could probably eliminate them by putting the tags within comments, but our opinion so far has been that the time is better spent elsewhere as the generation, upgrade and Perl would all need changing

- in many cases browsers aren't compliant. When choosing between compliance or rendering correctly in browsers, we choose rendering correctly

Any other cases of non compliance can be regarded as bugs, although I wouldn't see them as particularly important.

Yes, people talk about compliance producing higher ratings in search engines. But there is NO evidence to support this assertion. If people consult the real SEO experts this will be confirmed.

Banging on about the importance of W3C compliance impacting ecommerce results, without taking these points into account, is like suggesting that someone with a yorkshire accent can never make their way in the world as they don't speak Queen's English. It's ridiculous.

Chris

[marknc]

Points taken. I'm really glad actually that it's not part of the optimisation process. Thanks everyone for making it very clear. Great help.
Mark