Comments
Comment by Richard Anderson:
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BBedit has built in validation — not on the fly if one is typing code by hand, which would be interesting — but I often wonder if it is always “up-to-validatedness”. It has been a long time since I’ve done an external validation of any pages I make in BBedit.
Comment by ssp:
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I didn’t know this – probably because I’m not a BBEdit guy, both because of the hefty price tag and because I don’t like the program.
And even if I did, I’d have the same concern about the quality of its validation. - An argument that holds for iCab’s smiley as well, of course.
Comment by Abiola Lapite:
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If you’re willing to move to XHTML, why not use Mozilla as a validation tool? Invalid pages served up with an “application/xhtml+xml” mime type would simply refuse to render, and you’d even get a message telling you exactly which line was causing the problem.
Comment by Olivier:
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And do you have concerns about the quality of the validation of validator.w3.org?
Comment by d.w.:
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I’ve been playing around with TextExtras’ incredibly useful “Execute Pipe” command, in conjunction with HTML Tidy, and, well, it does pretty much everything I need. It’s Cocoa only, but since that means it works in both SubEthaEdit and Safari I’m pretty much covered 99% of the time I’m manually typing HTML.
Comment by ssp:
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Abiola: I didn’t know about the Mozilla thing. Thanks for the tip. The reason for me not using Mozilla is that I simply don’t like it - because it’s ugly and has about a zillion settings. But I supposed you could put up with that for development work, if really necessary. (Do more sane programs like Camino or Phoenix have the same way of dealing with this?) My next question would be how Mozilla deals with local files. Are they assumed to have that MIME type or not.
Olivier: While this point isn’t backed up by facts, my take on the w3c validator is along the lines of They made this up, so if they don’t know how to validate it, who does? So, basically I trust them most. This is corroborated by my experience that pages marked ‘valid’ by other programs would often contain more subtle problems that only w3c’s validator found. The word ‘validate’ should be used very carefully. In particular, I have the impression that some ‘validators’ can only give a negative result along the lines of Well, I didn’t find any problems. but not be affirmative that you have no problems at all.
Dave: TextExtras’ pipe menu command is quite cool. Unfortunately I hardly ever use it… as most things will require a bit of setup.
