We’ve published several blog posts in the past on the subject of W3C Validation, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is process of checking a websites coding to see it adheres to the rules and guidelines set out and maintained by the W3C advisory body.
If you develop and build websites on an ongoing basis, then you may be familiar with how time-consuming it can be to check each individual page of your website design against the free W3C Validation tool.
We carry out this practice internally for each of our customer’s websites, to ensure that every website we develop is compliant to the latest web standards. Although, we’re also keen on efficiency and two of my colleagues, Steve Maggs and James Kemp, have discovered a pair of W3C Validation tools which can help speed up the process of W3C Validation that we thought we’d publish on our blog.
Validate XHTML, CSS & XML Files Simultaneously using W3C Unicorn
http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/
Check any individual webpage across all of the W3C Validation tools
W3C Unicorn aggregates results from the W3C HTML, CSS, RSS & MobileOK Validation Tools and checks any requested page against all of the compliance tools at the same time. Developed by the W3C themselves and launched last month, if you’d like to retain control over manually validating each page of a website, this is the quickest method.
How to Batch W3C Validate an entire website using WDG HTML Validator
http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
Batch Validate your HTML 4.0 Pages using the WDG Validation tool
Simply type in the URL of any website, tick the ‘Validate Entire Site’ option and the WDG HTML Validator will instantly check across every page of a website to see if it meets the XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.0 web standards. If you’re building a large-scale website, the timesaving appeal of the WDG Validator is blatantly obvious.
Further Reading
Our previous articles on W3C compliance have included a two part series on How to Fix XHTML 1.0 Validation Errors (Part 2), The Advantages of W3C Compliance and How to Validate CSS3 Stylesheets.
Total Validator is also very good. I prefer if over WDG. http://www.totalvalidator.com/. The download desktop version allows you to validate an entire site for CSS, XHTML, accessibility and spelling. It does cost a small amount though buy worth it.