Rusk Family . com ... the legend continues

Code Validation

Now comes the moment of truth! Have you been a good coder? Did you close every tag? Did you balance you're quotes? Did you follow the standard?

Well, there are two ways to find out. Publish then go to the HTML Authoring newsgroup and ask for a critique of your page. Or use one of the web-based page validation sites where you can go anonymously and get a machine to do the job.

The Human Touch

I would definitely recommend the latter - unless you're into a little masochism! Not that HTML authors are bad people, they just tend to be a little zealous at times! If you want a live person or two to see your site then you can try the alt.html newsgroup which seems to be geared a little more to the newbie. Or for the really adventuresome go to the comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html group. This is where most of the zealots hang out so beware!

Machine

There's not much I can tell you about the validation services. They're all different and you just have to go to the sites and follow their instructions. The output they provide is pretty self-explanatory and it's kind of fun.

The first site I used was the Weblint Gateway. Sad to say, the author abandoned maintenance of the program back in 1997. Shows you how much I used it after I got going! His source code is still available if you're interested.

Another site that provided this service was A Kinder, Gentler HTML Validator by someone at the University of Alberta in Canada. But they bailed on us, too!

The best alternative now is to go straight to the big dog - W3C. I tried it out recently (May, 2001). Kind of a humbling experience. Time to dust off the spec and start really paying attention to detail. I got my home page to pass. Now to work on the rest.

With that happy thought let's move right along and learn how to publicize your site.

Michael T. Rusk
Comments to author: mike@ruskfamily.com

Revised: Sunday, December 30, 2007 11:05 -05:00
URL: ./htmlgd/valcode.html