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Support the W3C Validators

By Kimberly Blessing | December 20th, 2008 | Filed in Authoring Tools, General, Outreach, Validation, Web Standards (general)

The W3C has launched a donation and sponsorship program to support the free validators provided by the organization. Give today!

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It’s not often that Web folk are asked to give money to support Web Standards, so when the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) asks, we ought to listen up.

The W3C has launched the W3C Validator Donation Program to give Web people and organizations the opportunity to support what must be one of the most commonly used tools by those in our profession.

Think about it — how many times a week do you ping one of the validators to check your HTML, CSS, or feeds? Don’t you occasionally run the link checker on your site to find broken links? If you’re like me or any of the designers or developers I know, you probably rely on these services a fair bit.

As explained by Olivier Théreaux in his recent blog post, the donation program isn’t about paying for bandwidth or servers, it’s about continuing to improve the validators to support new languages, to fix bugs, and to add new features.

So what are you waiting for? Get in the holiday spirit and give to the W3C Validator Donation Program!

I heart Validator

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Your Replies

#1 On December 21st, 2008 4:09 pm John replied:

We support W3C and just made a donation to this wonderful program. We hope that all the readers will contribute to this cause in order for the free validators to be available for all.

#2 On December 22nd, 2008 5:47 am wortwart replied:

I see no point in supporting the W3C HTML validator which has had trouble with XHTML and has been (or still is, I don’t know) inaccurate. I rather use Validome.org’s service.

#3 On December 25th, 2008 12:55 pm Andrew Jaswa replied:

I’m not sure how I feel about giving to an organization that hasn’t been overly transparent about where the money goes. If the W3C wasn’t so slow about nearly everything they do, I might consider giving. But as wortwart points out, there are other better services out there. While I would rather use a validator written by the people who write the specifications but if they can’t keep up then well too bad for them. Come on W3C get with it.

#4 On January 5th, 2009 2:41 pm WaSP Member kblessing replied:

As pointed out in the W3C’s information, there are other ways to contribute to the validator program. If you have the expertise to help code or test the validators, you’ll be supporting the tools which are probably the most commonly used by developers worldwide.

#5 On January 7th, 2009 5:56 am cleopatra replied:

you should check and u ping one of the validators to check your HTML, CSS, or feeds once a weeks atlist

#6 On January 8th, 2009 2:50 pm goodwitch replied:

Happiness is donating to the W3C validator.

#7 On January 11th, 2009 4:03 am Angie replied:

Thats a good idea to come up with a donation program. I wanted to support them before, but their memberships are way to expensive for me.

#8 On January 25th, 2009 1:06 am Maureen replied:

As a web designer/developer, I visit the W3C web site for reference almost daily, whether to check syntax for my web pages or to validate code. I am honored to donate to the project.

#9 On February 2nd, 2009 5:14 am Solarmoduel replied:

I hope their membership will be a bit cheaper in the future :/ how much do you donate for the validator? greetz from hamburg Peter

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