[thelist] HTML Validator Across Different Browsers

[Lauri Watts]

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 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