Have you ever spent three hours writing "perfect" HTML only to have it display incorrectly on your screen? How long does it take to find the missing </td> in a large table? And I haven't yet met a Web developer who could spell. Even if you are not like me and don't make mistakes in HTML, wouldn't it be nice to know if your pages display differently between Netscape and Internet Explorer?
With HTML validators, you don't have to look any further than the Web to get clean, clear HTML in minutes. There are many validators out there, here are my three favorites:
Doctor HTML
My personal favorite, Dr HTML from Imagiware is a validator that is easy to use and gives a lot of information about your page:
- checks for spelling errors from a standard US dictionary
- analyzes image syntax and gives pointers to make your pages load faster
- verifies the HTML structure
- checks table and form structure
- verifies hyperlinks
- provides an HTML command hierarchy
Doctor Watson
Doctor Watson from Addy.com is a somewhat simplified version of Doctor HTML, but it provides an interesting feature, style checking. I love using this when I am adding a page to our Web site created by an outside vendor. I never know when they are going to have annoying click "here" anchors and headers out of order.
NetMechanic
The NetMechanic robots from NetMechanic.com add another power tool to your Web pages — link checking. This is especially useful if you have a Web page of links that you haven't updated in a while. NetMechanic will walk through your site and find all the non-responsive links. It will then email you a report with the results for your page. I especially like that I can set NetMechanic up to check my site and it will email me the results (whether validating the HTML or checking links). This means I don't have to wait for the results but can continue to write HTML.
There are many Web validators available, you can find more in my HTML Validators area.
