14 Mar 2005

Validate While You Browse

The HTML Validator extension for Firefox/Mozilla is a great tool for web developers, letting you check for errors in web pages as you browse.

I’ve noticed some iffy validation results (a paragraph within a paragraph should be an error in XHTML but gets listed under warnings) and interface glitches (the options screen isn’t all visible with my display settings), but it’s well worth a try.

The validation engine it uses, Tidy, has been around for years and is pretty easy to integrate into most software for checking and fixing markup, e.g. to ensure a content management system generates valid pages.