[thelist] Total Validator Pro subscription - worth it?

Lee Kowalkowski lee.kowalkowski at googlemail.com
Wed Jun 29 03:11:41 CDT 2011


On 29 June 2011 07:10, Stuart Young <drstuey at gmail.com> wrote:
> is the Total Validator Pro Tool worth the money?
> http://www.totalvalidator.com/tools/protool.html
> It says its the best HTML validator and it does accessibility, links,
> spellcheck too.

You can use the free version to see if it does what you want, I mean
the pro version doesn't have any extra validation rules.

You only need the pro version if you need any of the additional
features.  I've worked on projects where they've used the pro version
because they had automated regression test scripts that stored the
HTML response of every page, and automatically validated the HTML
using the Total Validator's command-line.  For £25, that was
definitely worth the money (a drop in the ocean for government
projects).

In fact that's the only reason I've seen the Pro version used for.
The other major features seem to be based on satisfying
authentication, this might be useful to some organisations depending
on when in the development life-cycle they're performing this type of
testing, but in most development environments authentication can be
stubbed-out or mocked so that the authenticated pages are accessible
directly whilst the application is being developed.

The browser extension is good for manual validation.  The only gotcha
with this is that if you have a page resulting from a POST, it will
launch Total Validator and that will issue a GET (but this is what
Firefox does when you view-source anyway), so you have to be careful
there.

-- 
Lee
www.webdeavour.co.uk


More information about the thelist mailing list