HTML5 Tools and Validation

HTML development would not be productive without tools that help you solve common issues and overcome frequently occurring situations, such as managing browser-independency.

HTML validation

You learned that browsers pamper you by means of skimming over the typos and semantic inaccuracies of your web page. Sometimes you do not even know that there are issues with a web page. But there’s a potential problem with relying on the browser to fix up your faulty markup. The standard defines what to do with a proper markup but does not specify how to overcome a wrong one. It might happen that a wrong markup causes mystic issues that behave very differently depending on the browser in which you display the page.

HTML validation tools are there to observe the anomalies coming from using an invalid markup. The W3C consortium, that leads the standardization process of HTML5, provides a validation service (http://validator.w3.org/) that allows you to check HTML content by its URI, by file upload, or even by directly typing it.

The image below shows this tool with a small HTML page typed in as direct input.