COAP:COAP-2100/week3-2011

Week 3

Topics Covered

Valid HTML

• Why is valid code important ?
• Validation strategies

Teaching materials

• HTML and XHTML validation and repair

Classroom activities

Monday

We will look at three kinds of validation tools:

• Various online services, in particular the W3C Quality Assurance Tools
• Using browser extensions in Firefox
• Using validation tools in your web authoring system

There are several types of validation tools:

• HTML/XHTML validation
• CSS validation
• Links checking (are they broken ?)
• Accessibility checking (can impaired people use the web site)

The W3C Quality Assurance Tool set includes several tools

1. http://validator.w3.org/ (Markup Validation Service)
   • You can enter a URL, upload file or directly copy/paste code
   • Supported formats (Sept 2009): HTML, XHTML, SMIL, MathML
2. http://validator.w3.org/checklink (W3C Links Checker)
3. http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ (on line CSS validation service)
   • URL validation: You can enter either an HTML/XHTML URL or just a CSS
   • Alternatively you can upload a CSS file (and pick the CSS profile).
4. Other tools, e.g. a Feed validator are available from the Quality page ...

Using web browser development tools

• Use of HTML Validator (install it if you didn't do it on week2). Basically you just go View-Source and look at the errors.

Using Tidy inside NoteTab light

• This may not work (since Tidy must installed on your computer)

Using the tidy program

• You can get various flavors from SourceForge
  • download HTML Tidy (command prompt tool that can be used withing several free/open source text editors like NoteTab Light).