valid8or is a web directory focusing on valid HTML. The purpose of valid8or is to provide information on valid and invalid websites and encourage the use of valid HTML according to W3C standards.

We would like to thank the developers of the following open source libraries used in valid8or:

• W3C HTML validator
• libchart
• prototype.js
• reflection.js
• shadow.js

A site is invalid if the HTML code it uses does not meet the HTML standards. Standards for HTML are maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (also known as W3C).

It can be surprising to learn that many of the most notable and popular sites use invalid HTML. As a web user you may not notice any difference, because your browser might display invalid HTML without any visible problems. But widespread use of invalid HTML does cause problems. For example, sites may look different (or even be unusable) in different browsers. Browsers need to be more complicated (and thus more bug-prone) to make invalid sites work.

No, not at all. The purpose of valid8or is not to impugn the worth of any website. It is simply to encourage the use of valid HTML.

A site can be invalid and still contain quality information or products. An invalid listing on valid8or shouldn't be interpreted as a recommendation to stay away from that site. Many of the most notable sites are invalid. If we list a site as invalid, we're merely saying that it may well be a great website, but if it used standards-compliant HTML we think it could be even better.

This is a good point, a link on valid8or may result in traffic to that website. However, we do penalize invalid sites. Every link to an invalid site has a rel="nofollow" attribute included. This ensures that a link from valid8or doesn't increase an invalid site's ranking in the search engines.

In contrast, we reward valid sites, by not including a rel="nofollow", thereby possibly increasing the site's ranking in search engines. So it is in the site's bests interests to be valid.

Just the home page. Naturally this doesn't tell us whether every page in the entire site is valid. But the home page should usually be fairly representative of a site, and it should be valid if you're going to consider a site valid.