March 14, 2005

HTML Validator for Firefox

I've been waiting for this little utility for quite some time now: a Firefox extension that validates every page you view. Doing HTML validitation can often be something of a pain if the documents in question live behind some sort of protection (firewall, authentication, etc.). The method I had been using, especially if the page was dynamically generated, was to load the page, do a "save as," then upload the file to the validator. Needless to say, this wasn't a smooth process. This little extension takes that away. If you can see the page in your browser, you can see the validation (in the form of a nice little icon in the bottom right hand corner). Sweet.

The only other browser I've seen with this built in was iCab, a mac-only browser that would display a smiley face or a frown face depending on the validation state. Unfortunately, it wasn't at the same level as the major browsers in terms of CSS support (and a few others things) when I last tried it a couple of years ago.