Thank you for this useful tool. :smoke:

http://validator.w3.org/
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
http://www.w3.org/RDF/Validator/
http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp

shoudlnt these be in everyones favorites?

Perhaps you should install the program first, there's a tab called options you know?
If you don't want to remove the code, then set it off.
I've managed to reduce my homepage size by nearly 10kb.
Now multiply that by thousands of members, by million views, get it?
Screw the validator, i'm paying bandwidth here, get the picture?
Again, thank you for that link Aaron. :)

you must only have like 1GB a month to really care about 10kb LoL ;)

sure it'll make the file smaller, but it makes it look like sh!t, it cultters it all into one huge lump of code.

I guess my point was this.

I would rather a scientific method of using code optimally IE the validator. Rather than an application that does not look for optimal code strings but optimal download time

All in all, the optimal code string will reduce cpu load and download time more than a smaller .php or .html file

(donning flameproof underwear)


You are a respected member here, but I must jump in (months late, granted) with my opinions...


First, w3.org are not gods. They are a committee, an organization. They are also out-of-control and need to be reigned in. They are trying to turn HTML into a page description format, but not the correct way. The monstrosity they have created is the wrong thing to introduce now, since Acrobat PDF is now ubiquitous.

They're giving HTML so many disparate layers that it is difficult or impossible to debug. Why is the W3 not holding protests in front of Microsoft HQ for IE not supporting PNG correctly? PNG is much more exciting to me than ripping apart the current tolerable TABLE system we have now.

I firmly believe that if you follow w3.org 100% you will end up in a straightjacket.

Any time you start using CSS, you cannot use it partially--you have to use it 100%. It does not co-exist peacefully with HTML because of the nightmarish inheritance.

It took me 3 HOURS to get a simple page looking the way I wanted with CSS. I should have just done a nasty search-and-replace and put manual font tags on everything. The tutorials on the web are horrible. They tell you what the tags do, not the when/where/why/how.

Look at the PHP manual. That is a COOOOOL manual. Everything has little notes about why you should or shouldn't use 1 command over another. Every command has links to examples of what situations this command is used for. There is no way I could have figured out arrays without a simple page like they wrote.

You know why I put the W3C-certified logo/button on that page? Because I felt I had accomplished something by wrestling CSS under control long enough to put out a page. If I did not have a use for this code for many other websites, I'd be furious.

Maybe I am just stupid, but I think I tried 50 different ways of assigning styles to the text on that page and they all had various inheritance problems until I explicitly laid out everything. First, I tried <h1> thru <h9> tags and it made pathetic attempts to marry the standard HTML <h1> - <h6> specifications with the CSS I was giving it.


If I add this as a style at the top of my page:
it makes all kinds of assumptions about what kind of linespacing, letterspacing, margins, etc. about any text you put inside:
I guess Microsoft is their role model?

HTML and CSS are supposed to be 100% explicit, 0% implicit. It should assume very little, and CSS assumes a whole hell of a lot.


Can I ask who is writing XHTML? I write fairly complex pages and I've never even heard of it. That's the great thing about standards. There are so many to choose from.

The W3.org Validator Hall of Shame

<center></center> is depreciated? So they are officially throwing out HTML?

<td background=""> is not valid HTML because background does not exist as a td tag? I wonder how they plan to do row backgrounds IN HTML without CSS then. Maybe they are just mad because Microsoft thought of this tag first?

<img src="spacer.gif"> is not valid HTML because it does not have an ALT="" tag? My website is about fish and a screen saver. It does not need to be accessible (I use ALT religiously on my other pages however).

<body LEFTMARGIN="0" BGCOLO...> And they intend for me to override the artificial 10 px margins on all sides of the page how? I am working around what I consider a bug in HTML and they tell me I'm writing invalid code? Um, ok.

<a href="version11.html"><font face="Helvetica,Arial">Download SereneScreen Aquarium version 1.1 with the new Lionfish!</a></font> They're still worried about non-perfect nesting? This is why you see hundreds of font tags on pages that could get by with 10. If a browser cannot handle "different" nesting, then the browser is buggy, not the HTML.

And there is no way to turn off these nuisance alarms in http://validator.w3.org/. I have seen, no lie, 1,000 errors on a page that displays perfectly well on IE, Opera, and Netscape before. Why can't it just tell me if I have any "show-stopping" HTML like missing end tags?


I guess vBulletin is full of HTML problems too since every single URL has this error flagged:

<a href="../forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1287">

cannot generate system identifier for general entity "threadid"



My HTML validator is Netscape 4.07. It absolutely breaks if you have 1 letter out of place. I know a few tags that hard-lock the program. :rolleyes: