Opera have kicked up a storm by launching an attack on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The case focuses on the anti-competitiveness of Microsoft bundling IE with Windows and their poor standards support.

It’s very easy for a web developer to take up arms against Microsoft (Goodness knows we do that often enough!), but in this case Opera is wrong.

I’m Free To Choose Whatever Browser I want

From Ars Technica’s Opera/IE write-up, we have this quote from the Opera CEO:

"We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them."

The W3C is the internet’s daddy. They created HTML, CSS, and dozens of other specifications that govern the use of the technologies that makes the internet thrive today. Valid code is code which meets their guidelines, and can be tested in a validator, such as the HTML and CSS ones.

Does valid code actually help your blog though?

The Mythical Benefits of Valid Code

• Valid code helps my search engine rankings. Good code helps your search engine rankings, i.e. code that the search engines can read. If you have used tables for presentation, causing your content to be split up in the coding, then Google will have trouble. However, if you just forget the trailing slash on your <img> tags, then they won’t be too harsh on you.