by Martin White

All web designers should be aware of the need to check the validity of the code contained within the pages they are creating before they make a page or entire site live to the public.

Increasingly it is just as important that we test our code for complience with accesibilty rules as to not exclude any portion of society from being able to access our pages.

Luckily The W3C (The guys who ‘invented the web’ pretty much and write the rules we should all be adhering to) - http://www.w3.org/ - have many free-to-access-and-use validation tools on their website to do all the hard work of finding any bugs and errors for us in various types of code, such as HTML, XHTML, CSS, Javascript etc.

But..

Wouldn’t it be brilliant if we could have a plug-in tool that lived in our browser and whenever we view ANY page on the web or our local system, it told us whether the page we we’re looking at contained valid html or xhtml code and/or complied with current accessibilty rules?

And wouldn’t it be brilliant if, by a simple double click of an icon the tool would produce before our eyes the code of the page, a full list of errors found and possible causes and sollutions for these errors?

Well..

Luckily, if you have Mozilla Firefox installed on your machine you can have such a tool FOR FREE!

Available from http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/ The HTML VALIDATOR (based on Tidy and OpenSP) is available as a free download and after a brief instal and restart of Firefox, will prove itself invaluable.

As you surf around you will see one of 3 icons in the righthand side of your firefox bottom tool bar.

If the icon is a green disc with a tick, the page is vailid to the settings you have chosen (validate html, xhtml, accessiblitly etc.)

If the icon is a yelow warning triangle, then there are errors which you should fix to bring your code up to date and compliant.

If the icon is a red disc with a cross (Oh dear!), you need to sort out some nasty bugs or errors which will definitly hamper the page being displayed in certain browsers or viewed by certain sections of the community.

It’s that simple!

Download it and wonder how you ever lived without it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Web development, Web design, Accessibility, Web browsers, CSS, HTML, JavaScript. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.