SillyDog701

[Don_HH2K]

I was wondering which was a more reliable source, HTML Tidy or the W3C Markup Validator. I'm having a few conflicts between the two.

Let's take http://don.sillydog.com/index2.html as an example. The W3C Markup Validator reports that I have a valid standards-compliant page. If I run the same document on the same server through HTML Tidy, I get 49 error messages telling me I have markup that shouldn't be there. So, which one is a better choice?

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.2) Gecko/20040804 Netscape/7.2 (Donzilla/0.2)

[akbash]

So, which one is a better choice?

To be sure, I don't know. But since no one else has answered...

I've always thought of the W3C Validator as kind of an official standard, and of tidy as more a, well, a tidying tool. I'd be more inclined to trust the W3CV for questions of compliance, but I don't have much support for that prejudice.

The errors you mention at don.sillydog.com are really only warnings; tidy isn't claiming your document is invalid. Strictly speaking, I'd say the W3CV is correct, your document doesn't break any of the hard rules of structure. But tidy is judging the document on an entirely different level. For example it just doesn't much like <big><big><big>. A bad childhood experience with Honeycomb, perhaps.

More to the point, tidy has noticed that there's no displayable content within the <big><big><big><span><span><span> sequence, and has decided to trim the overhead right out. I think you'll find if you insert some text within the innermost tags of that sequence in line 23, tidy gets a lot quieter about that line.

Maybe they're like virus scanners: two are better than one. Though in this case, and I haven't looked at all of tidy's complaints, tidy seems to be executing a handy kind of cleanup that's probably beyond the domain of the W3C Validators. Within the overlap of the two tools, I don't think there's any disagreement.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041227 Firefox/1.0+

[akbash]

So, which one is a better choice?

To be sure, I don't know. But since no one else has answered...

I've always thought of the W3C Validator as kind of an official standard, and of tidy as more a, well, a tidying tool. I'd be more inclined to trust the W3CV for questions of compliance, but I don't have much support for that prejudice.

The errors you mention at don.sillydog.com are really only warnings; tidy isn't claiming your document is invalid. Strictly speaking, I'd say the W3CV is correct, your document doesn't break any of the hard rules of structure. But tidy is also judging the document on an entirely different level. For example it just doesn't much like <big><big><big>. A bad childhood experience with Honeycomb, perhaps.

More to the point, tidy has noticed that there's no displayable content within the <big><big><big><span><span><span> sequence, and has decided to trim the overhead right out. I think you'll find if you insert some text within the innermost tags of that sequence in line 23, tidy gets a lot quieter about that line.

Maybe they're like virus scanners: two are better than one. Though in this case, and I haven't looked at all of tidy's complaints, tidy seems to be executing a handy kind of cleanup that's probably beyond the domain of the W3C Validators. Within the overlap of the two tools, I don't think there's any disagreement.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041227 Firefox/1.0+

[akbash]

Ugh. Pilot error. My immediate previous post is just noise.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8a6) Gecko/20041227 Firefox/1.0+

[Edward]

The W3C Validator at http://validator.w3.org/ should be considered official, and be used to check the validity of your web pages.

Before I published mine, I checked them against W3C to make sure they were error free.

UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041217

[webcoder82]

This is a good article on the importance of validation. It also says that the w3c validator is more strict:

http://www.netbulge.com/index.php?sessi ... 1114367789

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