Preserved Topic: validating

Lately, I see a lot of sites with 'validate me' icons.
What good is good doing?
Is is actually making my script viewable for the old browsers I missed to include in my crossvrowsing?

*I think the answer is no, it would be TOO good of a thing, but still, what;s it really doing?*

k10

IMHO Those validate me links are useless. Also, if you pass validating, it still won't guarantee you that your page will work in all web browsers...

As far as I know, those sites just check your code against the specs of different browsers and check for discrepencies. As max said, and he should know, they're pretty useless. There are some that can rewrite your code so your page can be viewed in all browsers, but that usually comes at the cost of having your page look radically different from what you originally intended.

Yeah, I run my stuff through validators for a couple of reasons. One, they point out missing tags, or incorrect tag order. That's mainly another pair of eyes.

Second, it does provide info and suggestions for correcting code to be cross-browser compliant.

Third, the one that I use (NetMechanic)shows loading speeds for various connection speeds, as well as ideas what some images will look like with various levels of compression.

They're not perfect. They report on some very common stuff, and you just need to look past that. Things like "type" with <script> is NOT compatible with all selected browsers. Also, if you're using Javascript to write some tags, especially BODY tags and stuff like that, the optimization just goes down hill from there.

Pugzly, in case you didn't notice, HTML Beauty comes with W3C's HTML TIDY, which you can use to validate your HTML code. You can create different HTML TIDY profiles in Tools / Program Options / Other / HTML Tidy and call them from the Tools / HTML TIDY sub-menu...

Hehehe. I just love the way Max plugs Beauty all the time.

*fg* I really have to get that Beauty! *g*
what does Pugzly mean with " "type" with <script> ".
Oreilly's says that is good programming habit if you write
<script language-"JavaScript" type="text/JavaScript">blabla</script>
instead of not using the type thing.
Shouldn;t validators respect that?

kars10

Yeah, they should, but I always get the error that it's not valid in some browsers. And some of my pages have quite a few of those <script> lines.

Max -

I saw that TIDY was part of HTML Beauty, but the problem is that it doesn't take into account code that is in INCLUDED files. For some things, (like me always forgetting the ALT tags for images) are picked up. But since the sites I do have a far amount of XSSI in them, I can't really validate it locally.

Oh, that's another story then... I *might* come with a solution when I implement file opening from ftp/http...