As an experienced web designer and application developer with 15+ years of “hands on” experience, I do my best to code all my XHTML and CSS really lean and clean as well as all my backend programming code.
However if I’m contracted to work on someone else’s HTML, CSS or website, the code might not always be clean and tidy which can cause some issues with scalability of a new design or site update.
This is where the W3C Markup Validation Service comes in handy. I love this tool. It helps show what is wrong and will even make suggestions on how to make corrections to bad code.
Most would think this is all fine and dandy but from time to time I’ll be working on a project with hundreds of pages and running each page against the W3C validation standards can be pretty time consuming and not cost effective.
Well thanks to a few Google searches, I came across a cool web application to help automate and simplify the process which uses a sites Google sitemap to help validate pages.
That’s right, validate your entire website in one shot! No need to manually check pages anymore. Just set it and forget it.
The application written by Chris Riley is called Website Validator. Pretty catchy name don’t you think?
How it works is you enter your sitemap URL in the box and hit Validate. Bam. You’re done.
Magically it will validate each page in your sitemap and report back on any that don’t validate.
Keep in mind that if you have a large site full of content and dynamically generated pages (like me), it could take a while to check everything.
Don’t worry because remember, it’s automatic. You can set it and walk away, then come back and check your results.
I ran my own site against it earlier and actually found a few posts that needed some fixing.
I still have a couple more to clean up but with this nifty web application, it won’t take long to track the issues down.
August 20th, 2008
5 Comments at "Validate all your HTML from a Google Sitemap"
Very useful, thanks for the tip!
Hey loops. You’re welcome.
I agree, it’s pretty useful which is why I posted about it
I waited for 880 pages to validate. About 15 came up bad…three of them my fault and the rest were comments. I fixed them all though.
Did you know the & in a post title will not validate? I didn’t either.
[...] the GeekWithLaptop pointed the way to Website Validator. The service checks your entire blog for XHTML standards [...]
You might want to validate your sitemap before checking all your pages. An excellent tool for sitemap validation is located here: http://www.smart-it-consulting.com/internet/google/submit-validate-sitemap/
Comment Now!