How to: Validate

What is validation? / What does it mean to validate?

Validation is a process by which an automated service checks how well a given file conforms to the current standards. Most validation services will return a list of all the errors and warnings it encountered throughout the file. For the purposes of grading this assignment, TAs will be using this HTML Validator and this CSS Validator. If you wish to give one of them a try and haven't created any of your own files yet, you could try uploading this page (validate.html), or if this page is on a website, you could simply click the XHTML image at the very bottom. Either method should result in no errors or warnings from the validator. This is part of your grade on the assignment.

Validation does not mean that your pages are 100% correct, or that they are easy to read and navigate. It means that you have coded in the style that current opinions say is correct. Because of the nature of the web and the lack of consistency between browsers on their support of even some of the major features of HTML and CSS, some major companies choose not to bother validating (for example, try to validate Google's homepage). Even though this is the case, we don't expect the code you will be writing to approach even a fraction of the complexity of companies that have paid thousands to hundreds of thousands to get the websites they have now, meaning you should be able to validate quite easily.

Being Cool

If you want to be one of the cool kids, you can always toss these onto the bottom of your page once you get both the XHTML and CSS to validate (and you can even use them for testing):

Using this HTML (You can even do a last modified, which is officially sexy):

<div id="footer">
  <p>
	<a href="http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer"><img
        src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml10-blue"
        alt="Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional" height="31" width="88" /></a>

	<a href="http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/check/referer"><img
        src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/valid-css-blue"
        alt="Valid CSS" height="31" width="88" /></a>

  </p>
<p>
Last Modified: April 10, 2008 by 
<a href="mailto: prismid@mail.gatech.edu" title="Email Your Name">Your Name</a>
</p>

</div>

With this CSS:

div#footer{
  text-align:center;
  border: 0px solid #999900;
  border-width: 1px 0px 2px 0px;
  font-size:70%;
  }

You can mimic our awesome, awesome footer as seen below.