One of the best tools for checking the validity of a page’s markup is the World Wide Web Consortium’s validator, available at validator.w3.org. I use the validator almost exclusively from within Firefox, into which I have installed the Web Developer plugin. This plugin lets you validate the HTML of any page, simply by selecting Validate HTML from the browser. The browser submits the page’s URL to the W3C validator, which then gives a line-by-line indication of what problems (if any) the page contains.
The W3C validator has at least two problems, however. First, it requires that you submit each page, one at a time, to the validator program. This means a great deal of time and effort, just to check your pages. A second consideration is more practical; the validator works only with pages that are accessible via the Internet, without password protection. If your site is being developed on your local computer, and if you have a firewall protecting your business from the outside world, you probably will be unable to use the validator via the Web.
One solution to this problem is to install the W3C validator on your local computer. You can get the source code from validator.w3.org/source, which comes in the form of a Perl program. On modern Debian and Ubuntu machines, you can install w3c-markup-validator, which makes it available via your local Web server, ready to be invoked.
If you end up installing the validator manually, it requires a number of modules, which you might need to download from CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), a large number of mirrors containing open-source Perl modules. It might take some trial and error to figure out which modules are necessary, although if you are an experienced user of the CPAN.pm installer, this shouldn’t be too much trouble. Note that the SGML::Parser::OpenSP module requires the OpenSP parser, which you can get from SourceForge at openjade.sf.net. As you might be able to tell, a number of these modules are required in order to handle alternate encoding schemes, particularly those for Asian languages. Even if you aren’t planning to handle such languages, the modules are mandatory and must be installed.
The validator program, called check, should be put in a directory for CGI programs or in a directory handled by mod_perl, the Apache plugin that lets you run Perl programs at a higher speed, among other things. You also will need to install a configuration file, typically placed in the directory /etc/w3c, but which you can relocate by setting the W3C_VALIDATOR_CFG environment variable.
Source of Information : Linux Journal Issue 182 June 2009
The W3C validator has at least two problems, however. First, it requires that you submit each page, one at a time, to the validator program. This means a great deal of time and effort, just to check your pages. A second consideration is more practical; the validator works only with pages that are accessible via the Internet, without password protection. If your site is being developed on your local computer, and if you have a firewall protecting your business from the outside world, you probably will be unable to use the validator via the Web.
One solution to this problem is to install the W3C validator on your local computer. You can get the source code from validator.w3.org/source, which comes in the form of a Perl program. On modern Debian and Ubuntu machines, you can install w3c-markup-validator, which makes it available via your local Web server, ready to be invoked.
If you end up installing the validator manually, it requires a number of modules, which you might need to download from CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network), a large number of mirrors containing open-source Perl modules. It might take some trial and error to figure out which modules are necessary, although if you are an experienced user of the CPAN.pm installer, this shouldn’t be too much trouble. Note that the SGML::Parser::OpenSP module requires the OpenSP parser, which you can get from SourceForge at openjade.sf.net. As you might be able to tell, a number of these modules are required in order to handle alternate encoding schemes, particularly those for Asian languages. Even if you aren’t planning to handle such languages, the modules are mandatory and must be installed.
The validator program, called check, should be put in a directory for CGI programs or in a directory handled by mod_perl, the Apache plugin that lets you run Perl programs at a higher speed, among other things. You also will need to install a configuration file, typically placed in the directory /etc/w3c, but which you can relocate by setting the W3C_VALIDATOR_CFG environment variable.
Source of Information : Linux Journal Issue 182 June 2009
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