Boot Camp

Web Authoring Boot Camp
To use the W3C Validator:
• Open your web browser and go to http://validator.w3.org/.
• Choose the ‘Validate by Direct’ Input tab.
• Copy your full web page code from your text editor and paste it inside the input
space provided on the W3C validator page.
• Click the ‘Check’ button below the input space (you may need to scroll down the
Validator page to see it).
The W3C Validator will check your code and provide a new pages, with the results.
• A red bar that reads “Errors found while checking this document as HTML or
XHTML (whatever version)!” means that your code has errors, and that you need
to scroll down the page to see them.
• A green bar that reads “This document was successfully checked as HTML or
XHTML (whatever version)!” means that your code has validated. You are authorized
to add the W3C icon on your web page if you wish.
The W3C Validator results can be very hard to decipher for newcomers and experts alike,
so the W3C maintains a list of error messages and their interpretation: http://validator.
w3.org/docs/errors.html
If you get a bunch of error messages, refer to Axiom #4.
Axiom #4: Don’t Panic!
Common validation errors include:
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• Doctype: A doctype declaration is mandatory for most current markup languages
and without one it is impossible to reliably validate a document. One should place
a doctype declaration as the very first thing in an HTML document and be sure to
use the correct one for the coding being done.
• No Character Encoding Found: An HTML document should be served along
with its character encoding. You can choose from a number of encodings, though
“iso-8859-1” (Western Europe and North America) and “utf-8” (Universal, and
more commonly used in recent documents) are common encodings if you are not
sure which to choose.
• Flash or embedded media does not validate: Many Flash authoring tools rec-