Friday, August 18, 2006

HTML Validator plugin for FireFox

For years I have been looking for a good tool to do HTML validation. These usually fall into one of two categories - online tools that you give a URL and it will validate the HTML. These tools only work if your web server is publicly available and has no authentication. They also fail miserably if you have any frames or JavaScript. The alternative are applications that run on your PC and pretend to be a browser. These work better, but I have never seen one that supports framesets. I've been using CSE HTML Validator Pro for a number of years despite this issue (it was invaluable when I was doing development at Netilla). It works great and is worth the $69.00, even though it doesn't work with frames (you can usually copy the URL into the clipboard and have the validator load the URL, but it is very cumbersome).

Well, somebody finally built a FireFox plugin that incorporates the Tidy HTML validation engine. It supports framesets and is awesome:

http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/

It was exactly what I have wanted for the past three years.

Work is being a pain. It looks like I'm going to have to work the weekend to get this thing done by Tuesday. Supposed to help Vikki move tomorrow afternoon.

I'm so tired.