Web Design Software Pick of the Week: W3C Validation Service
Sunday June 28, 2009
I just finished reviewing 9 different HTML validators, and my conclusion is that none of them are great. There are a lot of features that I wish that most validators have that most don't have. So it was hard to pick the best. The W3C validation service has the advantage of being a validator provided by the people who set the standard. Plus, it's free. It doesn't include features like checking links, spelling, or CSS, but you can use other tools on their site to do that as well. What I like best about this tool is that it checks your document against the DTD that you put in your document.
- Find out more about W3C Validation Service
- Learn my rankings for the other HTML validators
- What's your favorite HTML validator?
- See previous software picks of the week
Unfortunately still rely on various tools. But of course this is a very good one!
This is what I use. One file at a time from what I can figure out though. Kinda time consuming with alot of pages, like I have right now lol. Of course I could be missing something. Still new at this.
Scarlett
I agree about the w3c. Another good one that combines multiple tools including spelling, tag analysis, load time, and much more is sitereportcard.com. I used it to validate my Houston Internet Marketing website and it was great, they even email you a copy of the results. Ans it’s free.
I guess with free software, you will get what you paid for
Dave: true you “get what you pay for” but I evaluated several pay validators as well. If people know of good HTML validators (paid or free) I’d like to know about them.
Too bad the W3C validator doesn’t load and parse any custom DTDs, but just the ones on their predefined list, and just match it with the page’s DTD declaration. This somewhat takes away the “X” from XHTML.
Anyway, MSIE does not support XHTML or XML, so it doesn’t really matter – it’s all just some tag soup, parsed as simple HTML, unless served with the right HTTP header (which would make MSIE display a DOM tree). And since XHTML support is highly unlikely to get better, I seriously doubt the use of serving it as something other than tag soup.
P.S. Would validating server side (php) scripts do? I have a DTD parser script, and a markup parser too, they just need combining. Maybe if I turn them into a web service… Maybe…