New and Improved HTML Validator

W3C Markup Validator 0.6.5 Beta #1
The W3C announces the “ Zeldman Made Us Do It! ” edition of their online markup validation service:

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“Taking our cue from from a certain web pundit’s meanderings, the big news in this version is internal support for custom and customizeable error explanations. This means an end to digging all over the net drying to figure out what an error message means; just turn on the ‘Verbose Output’ option and the explanation will be displayed inline with each error message. If the explanation is not to your liking ... you can now submit your Nobel-nominate suggested replacement text through a handy-dandy mailto: link right next to the error. ... No reason to constrain yourself to weblogs any more.”

In addition to human-friendly error messages, the new beta validator also introduces an optional “fussy parsing” mode which reports technically kosher but potentially problematic issues in your markup. For instance, in HTML, it is technically legal to omit the start and end tags for the body element, but you might not want to omit those tags. “Fussy parsing” will catch such stuff, along with unencoded ampersands and more.

Thank you Jeffery

The W3C Markup Validator is a powerful tool for checking that your XHTML or HTML is free of errors. Unfortunately, it suffers from extremely unfriendly error messages which can make it hard for newcomers to validation to understand the problems with their markup. The team behind the validator released a brand new version yesterday which incorporates a number of improvements that have previously been trialled in beta releases ( changelog here ).

The most useful feature of the validator, at least for new users, is "verbose mode", which adds detailed human-readable explanations to every validation error. Unfortunately, verbose mode is not enabled by default and must instead be enabled using the Advanced Interface . Personally I would like to see this option available from the main page as it dramatically increases the usability of the validation results.

Heh, I'll never fully understand xhtml lol

it was buggy 1-2 weeks ago. I got some misleading error messages... didn't test it yet

I've been messing around with it and I've noticed that the XHTML 1.1 spec has changed slightly (all of my current web sites have had to be tweaked a little to fit the new spec), so it's worth giving the XHTML Validator a quick spin to see if you need to edit yours too.

Too busy at work to get it to the old spec lol...

Here's a whole page of links/bookmarks related to standards compliance/validation (courtesy joe clark):

http://www.fawny.org/webstandards/bookmarks/bookmarks-040526.html

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