 Validating HTML is a painful process associated with hard tedious work. After spending weeks working on the code for my pages, I’d like to think I am done once it is finished, but the validators always tell a different story. In this article I will discuss the importance of validating your HTML and provide you with links to the best validators.
Why is validating important?
Validating a page assures you that your code is compliant with the specifications, which means that it will render swiftly in a browser that follows the specifications. This is very interesting because, for starters, IE 6 makes an issue of not following the specifications correctly hence validating to the word will often hurt the way a complex design renders in IE. So, why validate?
There are other validators that use the specifications but have a different approach. For example, a validator that look for accessibility issues will help the way people with disabilities see your pages, and the way search engines do. As you can imagine, an eyeless robot/spider can’t see your page the way it renders in a browser, instead it relies on all those special tags for extra information that everybody forgets to code in.
Finally, you need your code to be more or less compliant because all browsers base their engines on the specification (even if they get it wrong). If you use proprietary code (i.e. Explorer only tags) today more than ever you will neglect a big percentage of visitors that use a different browser (at least 20%).
Just don’t hurt yourself trying to please the validators. Here are a few reasons why:
- Browsers are not dumb. Given the flexibility of HTML, they will make a serious attempt to render whatever code you give them, even if the code is heavily flawed; and usually get it right anyway.
- Validators don’t care for your mental health. They will toss at you every little dot and comma they can find, even if browsers don’t care about such little things.
- Validators don’t care about the render. They only care about the specification. If you have some tricky code that includes a fix for IE, the validator will want it off – but in such scenario the smart thing is to keep the fix.
Bottom line, validating is not a religion; let’s remember why we are validating in the first place. Your goal is to optimize your page’s functionality, not to please the validator. HTML validators are tools that you are going to use to make your site accurately accessible for browsers and spiders. If you are good enough with HTML you’ll be able to recognize which problems need correction and which are simply validator’s whines.
HTML validators on the web
W3C MarkUp Validation Service
“The W3C Markup Validation Service is a free service that checks Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.”
WDG HTML Validator
Very good validator; behaves a little differently from the W3C validator so it is a good idea to run both before starting to optimize your page.
Bobby
This validator will check your page for adequate use of accessibility tags & properties, which are the same HTML components that you need to place correctly for SEO purposes (search engine optimization.)
HTML Tidy online
HTML Tidy is an outstanding tool that not only warns you of problems, it will fix them for you. You may also use HTML Tidy offline (see below.)
W3C Link Checker
Very nice tool; it checks your page for broken links.
W3C CSS Validation Service
The W3C’s tool to validate your page’s CSS.
Offline tools
HTML Tidy
Excellent application to have around; Instead of a simple validation, HTML Tidy will fix your page. It comes embedded in many code editors these days, so you are not bound to using only this particular editor (Tidy UI). It may also be more forgiving than the other validators, so be sure to run a check with something else after HTML Tidy gives you the ok.
CSE HTML Validator Lite
Another nice validator that will help you fix your page. It also includes other aids like spell checker. If you like it, there is a more powerful commercial version available.
HTML Compress
This is not a validation tool. HTML Compress will strip your page of unnecessary chars for the purpose of decreasing its file size (faster download). Usually by compressing a page you can shrink its size between 10 – 50%.
Author : Esopo, Read 4836 times, Comments: 1| Rating : |   | | Sunday, 24. April 2005 |
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