Ask HN: Review my mini-app. Easily validate all the (X)HTML pages in a website.

by aarongough • 17 years ago

12 21 17 years ago

aarongough11• 17 years ago

I wrote this app to streamline the process of checking medium/large website for (X)HTML compliance... I basically want to get it out there so that other web designers/developers don't have to go through the pain of checking everything manually!

Let me know if you have any suggestions for improvements or find any bugs.

godDLL3• 17 years ago

INPUT: http://google.com/

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 47710208) (tried to allocate 35 bytes) in /home/aarongou/public_html/easy_web_qa/simple_html_dom.php on line 760

SUGGESTION: Sane-itize input.

aarongough11• 17 years ago

Haha, Ouch.

I hadn't thought of testing it with something quite as insane as Google. Nice catch!

JimmyL• 17 years ago

SUGGESTION: Have a limit on how far down (and across) you'll recurse

I got the same error when trying CNN.com

aarongough11• 17 years ago

There actually is a limit of 100 pages per submission, however it is obviously not storing the data for those 100 pages too well.

Looks like tomorrow is de-bugging day!

I wrote this app over the course of a day a couple of months ago and it's been languishing on my server since then. At the moment it's written in PHP and is not exactly what you'd call 'well tested'.

I'm considering migrating it to Rails (or Camping). Any suggestions for mini-frameworks (like Camping) suitable for a single-page app would be welcomed!

bazookaaa• 17 years ago

An extremely useful tool. Thank you so much.

aarongough11• 17 years ago

No, thank-you! I just hope that it saves some developers from unnecessary pain!

pbhj• 17 years ago

Is it really that different to the results with http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ ? You're dragging in W3C results too it seems.

I find that once I have the site chrome (structural features) valid then I don't really care too much about small errors that don't impact the appearance. When you've got code dragged in, with javascript calls, that doesn't validate anyway (Google, etc.) ...

These things always give millions of entity errors (other people dictate the URLs used) perhaps an intial view that just says which errors are on a page (broad categories) - entity errors, failed to close a tab, incorrect attributes, etc.. with drill down to the error details.

These details in the summary would be good too, as would the number of clean pages.

I don't like the dark theme.

aarongough11• 17 years ago

The reason that both validators are consulted is because they can pick-up different errors. The WDG validator is _much_ more reliable when it comes to finding unicode issues and that has saved my ass at least once.

Your other thoughts are things I'll keep an eye on when I do the re-write.

-A

tjmc• 17 years ago

Useful tool. While waiting for results, a progress bar would definitely be more useful in terms of feedback than the spinning logo.

aarongough11• 17 years ago

Noted! It may not be feasible for the first stage of the process though as the system does not actually know how many URLs are in the site.

I'll definitely have a look into that though.

godDLL3• 17 years ago

You might want to look at doing this in several passes:

- Build a site-map, like parsers build a syntax tree.

- Follow that to validate one page at a time.

natch• 17 years ago

Curious: Why would people use this instead of the W3 validator?

And for your fix list:

it's entirety -> its entirety.

aarongough11• 17 years ago

Difficulty with the W3C validator is actually why I designed this. Their validator doesn't allow you to check all of a site in one go. You have to go through page by page. Even on a relatively small site that can take a lot of time!

Ask HN: Review my mini-app. Easily validate all the (X)HTML pages in a website.

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