[thelist] HTML Validator Across Different Browsers
Lauri Watts
krazykiwi at yahoo.com
Sat Jul 1 09:53:25 CDT 2000
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On 6/30/00, 6:35:54 PM, <Gregory.John.Toland at ccmail.census.gov> wrote
regarding [thelist] HTML Validator Across Different Browsers:
> I was wondering if anybody knew of a great HTML validation tool that
validates
> across different browsers. I know there is the W3C HTML Validator that
> validates against HTML 4.0 (http://validator.w3.org/). I even found
validators
> for CSS; that being W3C's CSS Validator Service (
> http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/) and TopStyle 1.5 (
> http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/). But what about a good HTML validator
for
> different browsers (similar to what Topstyle does for CSS)? TopStyle is
great
> at validating against Netscape 4, IE 3, 4, 5, Opera, CSS1, CSS2, etc.
Thanks in
> advance for any suggestions!
I think you misunderstand what a valdator is, and if you had the right
terminology, you'd find what you're looking for.
HTML (and CSS) are either valid or their not. A validator compares your
markup to the standard and tells you if it's correct or not, nothing
more, nothing less. You can't validate against a browser, only against a
standard.
Perhaps you want a linter, which will tell you of "stylistic" errors, or
things known to cause problems. There's programs like browserola, which
are browser emulators, they "pretend" to be other browser to give you an
idea how things will look. But there's no way short of having the real
thing, to find out how your page is going to look on IE 3 on a mac, or
the Netscape 4.06 on a Win NT PC running at 1151 x 768 with large fonts.
You can't do it, you can only guess.
If your HTML is valid, then you can be at least assured it will display
in all settings (and if not, the browser that won't display it is broken
beyond repair) But you can't validate to a browser.
If Topstyle is telling you that's what it's doing, then it's wrong. It's
possibly validating against the CSS standard, but anything further is
just trickery and guesswork.
--
Lauri,
Köping, Sweden
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