CSE 3310 HTML Validator

Last month we were finalizing the Search Engine Update page of  this site and thought we had it wrapped up... Well, we looked at the page in Netscape Navigator 3.0 and it was in total shambles! Even though it looked fine in the preview window of FrontPage 98 and Internet Explorer 4.0, we obviously had a quite a problem.

We had suffered a case of "Code Bloat", an undocumented feature of FrontPage 98.  The FrontPage editor makes half way decent code when you create a brand new page, it's not real clean, but in most cases it works fine in both Navigator and Internet Explorer. The problem is that every time you modify the page, FrontPage tends to miss cleaning up bits and pieces of code here and there, after a while you have a huge mess.  It's one of those things you don't really notice much at first, but it's an accident waiting to happen if you make frequent updates to your pages.

We decided we had better start validating the pages before we uploaded them to the server. This means using an online Internet utility like Weblint or using a program on the local computer to check our HTML code against the HTML specifications. So we download and registered the CSE 3310 HTML Validator program and got to work. The first thing we found out was the Validator program will work directly with Textpad, our favorite text editor. These two programs together make a great combination for directly working with HTML code.

This error alone cost us two hours in manually cleaning that page, but when we were done, it dropped in size by 30Kb. This significantly reduced the page loading time and eliminated the browser compatibility problems completely.

We still use FrontPage, but now we make sure and check all of the pages we build with the Validator prior to uploading them to the server. It's added an extra step to our page creation process, but it's a sure cure for protection against "Code Bloat."! This is one of those must have tools.....