Posted by Nikita the Spider on 10/12/06 19:50

In article <Gb-dnZnupIaZFbPYRVnytA@pipex.net>, ato_zee@hotmail.com
wrote:

> On 12-Oct-2006, Jeremy <jeremy0505@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > That's fine, I have no problems with needing to correct the code, but i
> > do wonder about the reliability of these checkers - I would assume that
> > the one at w3.org would be the definitive?

Yes, it is. It's the Gold Standard. That doesn't mean that (a) it's
perfect, (b) it can't be bettered or (c) you don't benefit from
supplementing its reports with other syntax checking tools. But if you
only bother with one validator, that's the one to use.

> I use the W3C one. but also have CSE HTML Validator Pro v6.0 100.
> W3C seems comprehensive, but you should also use their
> stylesheet validator, for full validation.

I haven't used it myself, but I've read many negative opinions about the
quality of the CSS validator. I'm not trying to discourage you from
using it, but caveat emptor.

> CSE HTML Validator, as their website points out, finds things that
> W3C misses. Like mis-spellings, 7 numbers for colour values etc.
> That said I usually use CSE validator at the final stages, it tends
> to overwhelm you with warnings and errors, it's main value is it's
> batch mode which can check 30 (or more pages), with a few
> mouse clicks, to select all the html's in a local folder, and produce
> a nice report.
> So once the local copy of the site is clean, I run it in batch mode,
> before uploading, just to check I haven't made any typo's or
> introduced errors. You can't do batch mode at W3C.

I know of two validators that will check more than one page at a time.
The HTMLHelp validator is free and is based on the same technology as
the W3C validator.
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/

Click the "Validate entire site" option to get multiple pages validated.
The last time I used it, it stopped after 100 pages.

Alternatively, there's my spider (see my sig). It is also based on the
same technology as the W3C validator, has no page limit and will do link
checking for you too. It's free right now, eventually I plan to charge
money for it.

HTH

--
Philip
http://NikitaTheSpider.com/
Whole-site HTML validation, link checking and more

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