On Jul 9, 2006, at 7:53 PM, Christian Montoya wrote:
Time and time again:
- If you serve an HTML doctype as text/html (and you really should use
HTML Strict to avoid getting quirks mode in browsers like IE), then
validation isn't necessary, because you are relying on the SGML parser
with all of it's wonderful error correction to fix your mistakes when
the page is rendered. Even so, if you wonder why your CSS is not
working or your DOM scripting fails, then validating the HTML is a
good place to start.
Hear, hear.
As we all know, html parser 1 will understand and interpret your
error in one way, while html parser 2 will have another
understanding, and html parser 3 yet another interpretation.
It is pretty easy to install the W3C validator on your own
development machine.
<http://validator.w3.org/docs/install.html>
For OS X there is even a standalone package that only requires a
double-click on a disk-image.
<http://habilis.net/validatelet/>
For OS X see those instructions on Apple's site:
<http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/validator.html>
There is a similar how-to article for Ubuntu Linux; I lost the URL
unfortunately. Your favourite search engine knows about it, I guess.
- If you serve an XHTML doctype as text/html, well, don't.
:-)
+1
- If you serve an XHTML doctype as application/xhtml+xml, then your
question would be, "why doesn't my page display at all?" And the
answer would be, validate.
Welformed XML is not necessarily valid XHTML, but that is another
discussion.
Philippe
---
Philippe Wittenbergh
<http://emps.l-c-n.com>
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