Validate Your Code
Validation is an important part of ensuring that your web pages are useable by as many current and future web visitors as possible. The following links will take you directly to pages on the web that will assist you in this validation.
- Why upload your page and then discover that the source does not meet the HTML standards? The official W3C HTML validator will allow you to check your page source against the HTML or XHTML standards before you upload. W3C set the standards so who better to validate your page for you.
- Another way to fix many of the errors in your HTML source before you upload it is using HTML Tidy which is a free download that will not only validate your source but will also fix many coding errors for you.
- Once your HTML is valid you then need to check the other source on your page such as your stylesheet. The CSS Validator (also from W3C) can assist you with this.
- You don't only need valid code for your page, you also need the page to be accessible to many visitors who for one reason or another do not use the latest version of Internet Explorer or Netscape. Bobby can test your page for accessibility once you have uploaded it.
- Another problem is broken links. Some web sites will sell you a program that will check your links for you. I don't know why you'd want to buy one of those though because W3C also provide a free link checker that can validate all of the links on one page in one go. Alternatively you can download a free program from Xenu that can check for broken links over an entire web site in one go and then display the results in a web browser window for you. Both of these options also tell you about temporary and permanent link redirections so that you can decide whether you are linking to the most effective address.
