Saturday, 31 December, 2005

So it's the last day of the year. What a great year! I've been all over the world, seen all kinds of sites and done all kinds of crazy things. I will remember this year for a great deal of time as one of the best but I look forward to 2006 with a sense of optimism that this will be the best year yet. Next year, I have Tom coming over from Canada and I plan to go back to San Diego. I imagine at some point I'll end up in Spain and I'll probably be going Florida too.

Since this is mostly a technical blog, I want to finish this year on a technical note. I've found this great extension for Firefox called "HTML Validator". It's based on the W3C tool called HTML Tidy. HTML Tidy goes through broken HTML and attempts to fix the errors in it. The author of the extension has adapted it so it integrates with Firefox. The extension changes the "View Source" bit of the application so that it gives a warning and errors with regards to the standards compliance of the page. If there are any problems with the page it annotates the lines it thinks are wrong and then gives you the reason that it thinks it's incorrect.

It also adds a little icon to the bottom right of the Status Bar. It has three statuses: a green tick, a warning exclamation and red cross. The green tick means it passed standards validation and there were no warnings or errors. The warning exclamation means that there is a problem with the page but HTML tidy could fix it automatically if it were run on the source. The red cross error status means that there was something so horribly wrong with the HTML that even HTML Tidy is unable to fix it automatically.

The tool is a lot stricter than the W3C's validation service and throws warning at very small imperfections. It's great because at a glance you can see that your page is complying with the proper standards. Visit the web-site here.

Simon