It’s been a while since I used a fee online validator. A few years ago W3Validator would do the job just fine. Now that they switch to https://validator.w3.org/nu/ things seemed to have gone awry.
For instance, even with pretty major offenses such as unclosed , or tags, the document still comes up as having no errors. What gives? How can a validator ignore such obvious mistakes?
Is there a good alternative to a validator that can actually be useful to beginners?
@jsakellion and a warm welcome to the forum.
Can you supply a URL with errors that passes validation. Maybe warnings are showing?
Thank you! Glad to be here.
Link to a very very simple test page http://www.yanasakellion.com/test/. The closing html tag is missing and validator is not at all phased about it.
Perhaps the W3.org specifications do not insist on a closing html tag.
Selection “Outline” shows the following warning:
Thank you, John, I suspect that may be so. In fact, i tried to leave out opening/closing tags for: html, head and body and none seem to produce errors. Is this a thing now? Any tag that is a part of HTML5 template won’t be recognized as broken?
As you noticed the latest html doctype does seem to be very forgiving whereas selecting the strict doctype renders numerous errors and warnings.
I believe that correcting all anomalies will also validate successfully using the html doctype.
Thank you John!
I don’t know how familiar you are with doctype definitions, but I think this on the “original” validator is enlightening.
… As an alternative you can also try our non-DTD-based validator.
i.e. the nu validator is a conformance checker but without checking against a DTD there is less to check.
I have long considered the W3C validator as a tool not some type of “certification test”. Although a good number of sites can be found that seem to ignore valid HTML (and wonder why the site has problems) there are also some developers at the other end of the spectrum and obsess about every error and warning (IMHO, many Warnings should be Notices instead, meh)
https://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html
… Why validate?
The core reason to run your HTML documents through a conformance checker is simple: To catch unintended mistakes—mistakes you might have otherwise missed—so that you can fix them.
Beyond that, some document-conformance requirements (validity rules) in the HTML spec are there to help you and the users of your documents avoid certain kinds of potential problems. …
Coming from XHTML, that’s how I feel about much of HTML 5. It’s much too “tolerant of sloppiness” for my liking. But I guess if browsers can deal with it and it lowers the bar to enter web dev it’s OK by me.
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