Validation favelets

This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on September 7, 2003). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Jeffrey Zeldman has posted two ‘favelets’ for easy one-click site validation. Drag them onto your browser bookmark bar, and with one click, you can run any page you’re at through the W3C’s beta page validation service. Very handy.

On a related note, every page of this redesign validated from the get-go. The single issue I ran into was with a link in a story earlier where I’d forgotten to escape the ampersands in the link. The ampersand character — & — should be coded in valid HTML as &, and failure to do so will result in broken validation. Unfortunately, because many database-driven sites use a URL format of http://www.server.com/option1=“sample”&option2=“sample” or some such, you occasionally need to remember to fix the link so that it looks like http://www.server.com/option1=“sample”&option2=“sample”. A minor annoyance, but not insurmountable. Once I got that link fixed, I validated without any further changes needed. Go me!