[thelist] HTML validation for protected pages

Sam Carter scforum at iness.com
Fri Aug 6 10:07:14 CDT 2004


Sam Carter wrote:

> I develop dynamic web content that requires user login before 
> accessing the
> page.  It's a lot of trouble to validate the HTML since these pages 
> are not
> accessible without login.

Develop locally and install the validator on your dev server then turn 
off authentication while validating?

There were several suggestions along these lines.  

The courses we develop deliver content specific to a user's login ID.  It's
not just authentication that's going on, but the content on the page is
often user specific or context specific.  It's tough to "fake" a user on a
specific page for external validator's purposes.

Adding a querystring key for a validator would work on some, but not all
pages.  I've been there and done that for our courseware and preferred to
drop it in favor of "Local HTML validation".

Hosting a validator on our development server doesn't solve the problem
either.  It's another session, and the course requires login for a session.

About the only thing that would be *cooler* than the "Local HTML Validation"
of ( http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/) would be an
HTML validator that I could point at the login screen and have the service
login and validate all pages.

Sam





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