When I was a kid, I was in Cub Scouts for a couple of years.  I mainly wanted to do the Pinewood Derby and made a car called “The Flying Pencil”, shaped as - you guessed it - a pencil.  It looked great, but raced poorly, so no dusty Pinewood Derby trophys are buried in a box here at Boyink Interactive Headquarters.

I dropped out of Cub Scouts right at the transition point to Webelos, because (near as I can remember) I saw that the whole program was about doing projects in order to earn the badges for them, and I didn’t care much about the badges.  The badges were only meaningful to other Scouts, you could only wear the Scout uniform to Scout events (unless it was picture day at school) and I just didn’t care to take part in the “my sash is fuller than yours” game.

These days I’m seeing web developers using “Scout Badges”, only the badges are links on a site that they’ve developed.  The links are to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) HTML Validator and CSS Validator. 

For the non-web developers reading this, the W3C is a body of people and organizations working to develop standards for the web, and the validators are services provided by the W3C for developers to use to analyze the web pages they’ve created to ensure they meet the standards set forth by the W3C.  If a web page is “valid”, it usually displays more consistently in different browsers, is more accessible to people using other devices to visit the web page, etc.

By linking directly to these validator services, the web developer who wrote the page is essentially putting a badge on his sash, pointing out the fact that his code validates.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not saying web developers shouldn’t use web standards and the W3C validator services.  I’m all for building sites using web standards.

What I’m saying is that, on most sites, these links - however small and insignificant - serve no purpose to the site’s owner or audience and open up a chance for user confusion. If we are truly building sites in a “user-centered” way, then any page elements that don’t serve a purpose for either the site owner or the user should be removed.