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Simon Mundy · May 4, 2003, 07:54 PM

...besides the validator.w3.org?

It's a great service, but only allows one page per operation. What I'm after is something that allows you to recursively validate all pages within a site.

I use BBEdit for checking 'static' sites, but complex sites that use lots of includes, or Lasso sites (whose tags aren't understood by BBEdit) throw a lot of "errors" that don't show up in the interpreted result pages. I want to ensure the pages that actually get served from php or lasso are XHTML valid, and I want to do it site-wide rather than per-page. Imagine checking per-page on a 200 page site?!?

Any suggestions?

wallinbl · May 4, 2003, 09:50 PM

If you know PHP, why not whip up a little script to enumerate the pages on your site, check them against W3C, and log the results?

Simon Mundy · May 4, 2003, 11:55 PM

Originally posted by wallinbl:
If you know PHP, why not whip up a little script to enumerate the pages on your site, check them against W3C, and log the results?

Indeed, but it all takes time... I was hoping that there'd be an 'instant' solution but I'm coming around to thinking that may be the way to go to 'roll my own'.

Would anyone else be interested in a version that plugs into the 'HTMLTidy' library at SourceForge? I was thinking of a simple program that you can define sets of preferences (so you don't need to reset each of the Tidy parameters each time), and redirecting output to a specified log file so you can view your results in one place. Perhaps I could even pipe that into a PDF document... Any thoughts anyone?

wallinbl · May 5, 2003, 08:37 AM

I've wanted something that would do this, but never spent the time writing it. Most of the tools I have looked at didn't seem very efficient to use. One of the problems I have is that there are too many output variations for each page, depending on form/querystring values. It becomes difficult to test the output in all potential situations.

Richard Edgar · May 6, 2003, 03:51 PM

Is this what you want?

Simon Mundy · May 6, 2003, 07:10 PM

Originally posted by Richard Edgar:
Is this what you want?

Yep, but with the ability to crawl through a site, rather than for me to have to enter every URI by hand.

Thanks for the link.

wallinbl · May 6, 2003, 08:19 PM

Originally posted by Simon Mundy:
Yep, but with the ability to crawl through a site, rather than for me to have to enter every URI by hand.

Thanks for the link.

Did you try clicking the checkbox that says 'Validate entire site'?

Simon Mundy · May 6, 2003, 09:22 PM

Originally posted by wallinbl:
Did you try clicking the checkbox that says 'Validate entire site'?

LOL!

Next time I'll spend a few more seconds looking... Thanks for the headsup.