I’ve found that for doing web development of any kind an absolutely indispensable tool is CSE HTML Validator Pro. This is an amazingly versatile tool. Basically, you take the source for your web pages, run it through the tool, and it tells you what’s wrong in immense detail. It does this page by page, or in batch mode. It can operate off of live web pages, read files, or by pasting in source code. It tells you about standards compliance, syntax errors, spelling errors, it checks your JavaScript, it checks accessibility, and makes sure all your links work. It’s enormously configurable, allowing you to create custom validation schemes, selectively turn on or off different tests, either as a matter of policy, or on a one-off basis. It works equally well with html and xhtml. You can also directly edit files in the system, which lets you dynamically debug your way through problems. I’ve been using this tool for many years, and watched it get steadily better through many upgrades. I find it useful in a variety of different ways. It’s good for debugging new web pages, particularly to ensure consistent cross-browser and cross-platform operation. It’s good for cleaning up finished pages to check for typos. It’s also very useful to do maintenance on existing pages to check that external links still work. I find whenever I run it against some project I almost always learn something new.
On my latest project I found an interesting way to simplify testing the web site. Since there are many, many pages, with thousands of links, running the pages one at a time through the tool is cumbersome. So I created an automated test that uses CSE Validator. I first created two specialized web pages. One dumps out all the links in the system, and next to each link is a second link back to the spot where the original link was found. The second concatenates all the static html from the site into one long page, again with cross-links back to where the original html came from. Then I connect these pages to CSE, and let it validate them. This way only two pages get executed, but all the static html and links are tested at once! As errors are found, they are easy to fix, because I can use the embedded cross-links to take me back to exactly the spot where the material came from, making it easy to fix the error. In this fashion a ten minute test can verify thousands of pages and external links and make sure all links work, html is correct, and that there are no spelling mistakes.
CSE HTML Validator – never leave home without it!
