Version 5 W3C Validation Errors

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Brett

Groupie

Joined: 22-April-2008
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Status: Offline
Points: 89

Topic: Version 5 W3C Validation Errors
Posted: 09-July-2014 at 3:21am

I'm working on upgrading our store to version 5, and I wanted to check it with the W3C validator before making too many changes. It showed 6 errors for my new v5 homepage.

I figured it might just be a problem with my installation, so I went ahead and pulled up the ProductCart homepage and ran the W3C test again. It's showing 7 errors, one was "Duplicate ID menubar99", which I figure is a result of the specific setup of the demo site. The other 6, however, appear to be the same as the ones on my development site.

These all appear to be related to Angular.js. Is there any plan to fix these issues?

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.productcartdemo.com%2Fstandardv5%2Fpc%2Fhome.asp&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

Brett

Groupie

Joined: 22-April-2008
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Status: Offline
Points: 89

Posted: 09-July-2014 at 3:26am

This category page (as well as most of the category pages) is showing 15 errors. It seems that all category pages show between 11 and 15:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.productcartdemo.com%2Fstandardv5%2Fpc%2FviewCategories.asp%3FidCategory%3D5&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0&user-agent=W3C_Validator%2F1.3+http%3A%2F%2Fvalidator.w3.org%2Fservices

ProductCart View Drop Down

Admin Group

ProductCart Team

Joined: 01-October-2003
Status: Offline
Points: 135

Posted: 10-July-2014 at 6:08pm

Hi Brett,

Thank you for sharing the results of your W3C validator. Our development team has reviewed them and believes most of them are things we can (and will) address in the next release. That said, they cautioned me about the possibility that some pages in ProductCart still might not pass this type of validation (since it's not always possible to meet the requirements of every device and browser while still maintaining 100% W3C compliance). In addition, customers need to make sure that their header and interface files are compliant, otherwise the validation could still fail even if the ProductCart part of the page is okay.

In any case, we will do more in-depth W3C testing before the next release, with the main emphasis being on the primary ProductCart pages (versus those that require a customer to be logged in to view, etc.).

Hopefully that makes sense, but let us know if you have any other concerns or questions.

The ProductCart Team

Home of ProductCart shopping cart software

Brett

Groupie

Joined: 22-April-2008
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Status: Offline
Points: 89

Posted: 11-July-2014 at 2:40am

Sounds good, thanks!

Check this out: http://html.validator.pro. It's the best (and only) validator thing I've seen that allows you to validate an entire site in one go. Usually you'd have to manually click through all of the pages and run it on each one.

Might help you guys in validating it before the next release.

Brett

Groupie

Joined: 22-April-2008
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Status: Offline
Points: 89

Posted: 23-July-2014 at 8:01am

It looks like there are many more errors throughout the new version, as far as I can see.


<div align="right">
    $222.40
</div>

Why is the align attribute being used?

It also appears that most of the images don't have alt attributes, which is apparently required "under most circumstances".

We're looking to upgrade to version 5, but I'm worried that I will keep finding more issues like this as. Was this version developed with best practices in mind?

A BTO product I'm testing on the new version has 179 errors on the page. Surely this can't be good for SEO?

Color me worried :/

Matt

Moderator Group

Joined: 20-July-2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 73

Posted: 24-July-2014 at 9:20am

Hi Brett,

Most SEO experts agree that W3C validation has no effect on SEO rankings.

Don't take my word for it.

Matt Cutts of Google says in the video below that Google does NOT check W3C validation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPBACTS-tyg

Google's own sites have hundreds of W3C validation errors.

ProductCart v5 follows SEO Best Practices and includes several new features to help your rankings, such as including microdata.

This is by far the best version of ProductCart ever released.

There are dozens of new features to help increase sales that your customers will notice.

At the end of the day Google and your customers are not going to be checking W3C.

Greg Dinger View Drop Down

Certified ProductCart Developers

Joined: 23-September-2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 238

Posted: 24-July-2014 at 12:53pm

I'm no SEO expert, by a long shot, so I don't want to debate the merit of W3C compliance as it relates to SEO. But I do know that when our merchants engage SEO consultants, one of the very frequent requests that happen early in the relationship is that we are asked to perform a W3C cleanup.

When our customers start looking at SEOMOZ, Webmaster Tools and other sources that complain about various code issues – they are inspired to respond (or ask us to respond) to the laundry list of changes that those tools recommend. If there are issues that can be resolved, such as W3C compliance, why leave them up to discovery by such tools, and thus open to debate by web site owners?

I see the article from which you likely drew your assertion that "most SEO experts agree", along with the video of Matt Cutts. But here is more from Cutts. From this article:
http://www.contentcustoms.com/blog/does-google-penalize-for-invalid-html/
<<<Cutts says there’s no guarantee that they won’t somehow use HTML quality as a ranking factor in the future, but for now, your primary concern when it comes to ranking should be providing relevant, truthful information to your users in a way that’s easy to navigate and understand.>>> Just the fact that it might matter to Google in the future, or that it might matter to other search engines, leaves me believing that W3C compliance is fundamentally important.

With regard to your assertion that "At the end of the day Google and your customers are not going to be checking W3C", that may be true of the merchant's customers, and it might even be true (subject to future changes) about Google. But I entirely dispute that point when it comes to me as a developer dealing with my clients who run these stores. THEY WANT W3C COMPLIANCE - I know that for a fact. Brett's thread here is a perfect example. We deal with these requests, for whatever reason, all the time.

Most SEO experts may indeed agree (at least according to that article which we both read), but there are enough SEO consultants out there that will be telling clients about the importance of W3C compliance, that I don’t expect to stop hearing about it just because you or that article take the position that W3C compliance is not critical to SEO. Many web site owners believe that to not be true, or are told to believe it to not be true, and for them it becomes gospel.

Additionally, it was made rather clear in the lead-up to releasing v5 that W3C compliance was a planned goal of this new release. Did something change and you guys decided to take a pass on that goal?

Matt

Moderator Group

Joined: 20-July-2006
Location: United States
Status: Offline
Points: 73

Posted: 24-July-2014 at 1:35pm

I am going to post our position on this matter as clearly as possible and then I am closing this thread.

If anyone would like to discuss further, then I invite you to contact us directly and we will be happy to have a full length conversation about it.

It is very important to me that misinformation is not floating around here to confuse store owners.

1) As we already posted above the W3C issues will likely be resolved in the next release. We have been… and still are… working on W3C compliance, but it is a process. So to be clear, we are working on W3C compliance and many pages already are compliant (or extremely close).

2) You mention Google "may" validate HTML in the future. If they do ProductCart will be ready! We have always stayed on top of the latest SEO requirements. It is not correct (and very misleading) to suggest that W3C compliance will affect rankings. We can have an entire conversation on those services and tools you mention separately, but it is a fact that Google does not validate your HTML today. It is very important to be clear on this point as many store owners are compelled by misinformation to spend time on things that have little to no impact on their rankings.

3) Our position was not based on an article found on the web. Our team has extensive experience with SEO optimization and subscribes to all of Google's blogs and feeds. We watch of all of Matt Cutt's videos and use years of real world experience in drawing our conclusions.

4) Greg, as a long-time reseller, your customers are store owners. As you are saying, store owners do care about W3C compliance, and that is exactly why we have said we are working towards it. What I said is customers are not checking for it… and by customers I mean "shoppers". How many shoppers to do you feel run your site through a W3C validator before they purchase? We have spent the past year focusing our development on the top features that will increase SEO ranking and sales “for real”. For instance, our work with Google Trusted Stores is a much better indicator to a customer that your store is trust worthy than if your source code contains an "align tag".

Our goal is the deliver the best possible software and we've spent our time on what we feel is the most valuable in terms of cross device compatibility, generating sales, and effective SEO. W3C compliance will come, but if you are looking at reasons to upgrade there are dozens of new features with concrete value over W3C.