Remember when you were in grade school and your Mom or Dad checked your homework? Well, for website and blog owners, our automatic homework checker is the HTML Validator provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the organization that sets the standards for HTML and other Internet technologies. The best part of using the Validator is that it delivers its report in the privacy of your office, without Mom’s raised eyebrow!

Simply visit http://validator.w3.org, the page entitled Markup Validation Service. Markup refers to the fact that the text in your web pages and blog is “marked” with HTML or XML tags. Here you have 3 choices: point the tool to the URL of an existing page, upload a page to be validated, or copy and paste a block of HTML code into the page. The Validator will check that the tags are properly formatted and deliver a line by line report. You can print the report if you want to use to review and make changes to your pages.

The tool reads your page from top to bottom and makes its report accordingly. For example, if you’ve left the DOCTYPE declaration off the top of the page, the tool may flag items that would be acceptable if the DOCTYPE were in place. Most HTML editors automatically insert the DOCTYPE declaration at the top of the blank HTML pages; if yours  does not, then visit this URL http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-doctype to see an example of one, and add it to any pages where the validator reports it to be missing. Adding the DOCTYPE declaration may clear up a lot of errors on the page.

I’ll write more about the DOCTYPE declaration next time.

Toolie®

P.S. a special thanks to Rosie, one of my students, for reminding me about the validator and for providing the URL. She wrote about her encounter with the Validator in this post.