HTML Validation

[Scott Bauer]

On Mon, 10 Feb 1997 09:45:02 -0500, drewwe at morrisville.edu wrote:
 
> I am getting a little irritated with so-called validaters.  There are
> too many that report as errors things that aren't really errors.  None
> of them are completely reliable.  The only one I would recommend at all
> is Spyglass's free beta validater.  I check my pages occasionally with a
> validater. I check them ALL of the time with Lynx, Netscape, Internet
> Explorer, and now the newest Mosaic.  I'm about ready to say"TO HELL
> WITH VALIDATERS" until they are built into the HTML editors much the way
> a spell checker is part of a word processor.

Making the large assumption that you use a Windows 3.1/95 machine on
occassion for your HTML work, you may wish to take a look at the excellent
shareware HTML editor "Webber" (http://www.csdcorp.com/webber.htm).  It
comes with a built-in validator, so you can interactively check and edit
your documents.  (Even if you primarily work with another editor, you may
well want Webber for this feature alone.)

Still, while Webber is excellent at HTML validation, there are other kinds
of checking that it is not intended to do.  Things like checking for
broken links, advising how long an image might take to download, whether a
page is accessible to as many different users as possible.  So I recommend
using the following, web-based validators as well:

Dr. HTML (http://imagiware.com/RxHTML.cgi)
Bobby (http://www.cast.org/bobby/)

Both have caught more than a few gray areas on many of my pages.  (Though
I will admit that I don't always correct everything they find... :-)

Now, if only someone would come up with an editor that did ALL of these
kinds of checking, helped organize my site, had a "WYSIWYG" interface
that also displayed the HTML being generated in a separate, editable
window at the same time, etc., etc., etc....  Well, I'd be a real happy
camper :-)

Scott Bauer   sbauer at ccnet.com   OR   sbauer at mail.contra-costa.lib.ca.us
Contra Costa County Library