About the Validator

The Hows, Wheres and Whys

The HTMLSource HTML/XHTML Validator is a collaborative project launched by Ross Shannon (yourhtmlsource.com) and Andy Belcher (dandylife.com).

Our story begins in August ‘02. Looking to improve the overall experience of his HTML-based website, and seeing a general gap in the market for a truly helpful validator, Ross had long been considering taking one of the two existing validators, sprucing it up a bit, and repackaging it for his own use; but sadly his Perl programming experience was not up to the task. Out of the blue, a lengthy email from a one ‘Andy Belcher’ arrived in his mailbox. The two got to talking and lo and behold, Andy was on the lookout for an interesting challenge with which to flex his programming skills.

And so it began. Acting as ‘HTML consultant’, which always makes him laugh, Ross put together a basic set of rules which a validation program should live by. A multitude of emails were exchanged across the Irish Sea. Not a month down the line and the brief had tripled in size as the complexity of the project became apparent to both parties. But through adversity and triumph, and due in no small way to Andy’s programming expertise, the program took on a very real shape.

In acknowledgement of the necessity to stand out in the face of established competition, brains were stormed and features were designed in order to make this truly the best validator available — one which provided equal utility to an inexperienced webmaster as it did to a master of Markup. Through many, many revisions, it was built up into the first version we excitedly released upon an unsuspecting public in May 2003.

Which brings us to the present day. It’s finished. Use it. Like it.

If you can spare a moment, we’d also love to hear your feedback on the validator, in order to add more features.

Questions, Answered

Which versions of HTML are supported?
At the start of development we decided to concentrate on the standards in use in the vast majority of our users’ websites — HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 — and all three flavours of each (Strict, Transitional and Frameset). The program is extendible however, so it can be made to validate against other standards, as long as a DTD URL is specified in the doctype line.

What does this validator offer over, say, the » W3C Validator or the » WDG Validator?
Both of those validators are fine services. Indeed, a lot of the functionality of ours is based on these two programs. However, since we built ours from the ground-up, we’ve been able to incorporate all sorts of improvements. Firstly, our custom-built parsing program is capable of delivering much more helpful and specific error messages. The error text has been carefully written in all cases to provide the maximum assistance in identifying what exactly the problem with your page is. We’re confident that you’ll find the results of our validation to be very helpful. Also, we reckon our fancy-ass DHTML layout is easier on the eyes than the competition.

Have a question? Ask it: htmlsource-validator@f2s.com

Credits

Formally, the people involved were

Andy Belcher of dandylife.com, the skilled programmer responsible for the programming and technical design.
Ross Shannon of yourhtmlsource.com, who designed the validator’s reports and acted as Markup consultant for the project.