Online Options

Online service options

When you click on the Validate your site link you will be presented with a form displaying the most commonly used options.

Enter a URL for the page you wish to check, and that page will be validated in line with the other options you've chosen.

If you wish to validate more than one page, take snapshots at a different resolution or with multiple browsers, add your own words to the dictionary, ignore certain errors etc., then click on the Advanced Form link and a form will be displayed to allow you to do this.

If you wish to cut and paste a text file of your page then click on the Cut and paste your page link and a form will be displayed to allow you to do this. This form is based on the Advanced Form.

If you wish to upload a file containing your page then click on the Upload your page link and a form will be displayed to allow you to do this. This form is based on the Advanced Form.

Starting web page

Total Validator will validate the web page you specify using the validation options you've chosen.

If you are using the Advanced Form then you can validate more than one page. In this case the validation engine will start at the web page you specify and work it's way down through your website validating each page. Note that it will not visit any pages 'above' the starting page in the website. In effect it will not go to any pages with a shorter URL than the starting page.

You must supply a full URL including the 'http://' part. As such you cannot supply a relative URL such as 'forms.html'. You do not need to supply an actual web page if your Web Server will resolve this to a real web page. For example 'http://www.totalvalidator.com' is okay and can be used instead of 'http://www.totalvalidator.com/index.html'

Page to validate

This option appears on the Cut and paste your page form. Simply paste in the text representing your web page and it will be validated using the validation options you've chosen.

Upload page to validate

This option appears on the Upload your page form. Click the Browse button to select and upload your web page and it will be validated using the validation options you've chosen.

The file that you upload cannot be larger than 2MB (this does not include any images or other resources referred to).

Email address

You will need to supply this if you are checking more than one page of your website. However you can choose to enter your address even if you are just checking one page rather than waiting around for the validation to finish.

Please check that the email address you enter is valid and that it can receive emails with zip file attachments (see Attachment suffix). When taking multiple screenshots the attachment may be over 1MB in size, so please ensure you can receive large emails.

Note that your email address will not be collected or passed onto any commercial organisation - I hate spam as much as the next person. However, if you're worried get a temporary email address from someone like Yahoo.

Attachment suffix

Results returned by email are zipped up and attached as a .zip file. If your mail server does not allow .zip file attachments you can attempt to circumvent this by having the attachment's suffix renamed to whatever you wish (e.g. .piz) by using this option. Then you can rename the attachment back to .zip when the email arrives to retrieve the results.

The suffix that you provide can only contain the characters '.', 'a-z', and '0-9'. It can't end with a '.' either. Whatever you enter will automatically be converted to all lower case characters.

Number of pages

The fewer pages you check the quicker the validation will take. You often don't need to check your entire website, especially if most of the website uses templates and so is the same on every page. So just checking a portion of it should give you everything you need to correct your site, or give you confidence that it is still okay after deploying any changes.

Note that in order to avoid abuse you can currently only check up to 5 pages.

The value that you enter here must be an integer (whole number) from 1 to 5, or leave it blank to check 5 pages.

Also note that Total Validator works through your website in a recursive fashion going down through the website first, rather than validating the top level, then the second level and so on. As developers tend to use different templates for different levels of the website this should cover more templates in fewer pages. However, if you wish to carry out a shallow test of your site, use this option in combination with the Depth option in order to get more from your 5 page limit.

Because it may take quite some time to check all of the pages of your site, if you enter a value greater than 1, the validation service runs in the background and then emails you with the results. In this way you can get on with your life whilst Total Validator checks your website.

Depth

This option allows you to restrict how many levels down into your website to check. Each extra level can be thought of simply as another folder down in your website. This is most useful with the Pages option where you want a check of the top levels of the site, rather than checking entire branches of the site.

The value that you enter here must be an integer (whole number) from 1 upwards. Leave blank to cover the entire site or to the page limit, whichever is smaller.

Skip path

You may not always wish to check certain parts of your site, especially as the number of pages you can check online is limited. This option allows you to skip part of the site by specifying a path to ignore.

The value that you enter here must start with a '/' and be more than just a single '/'. Any pages that lie below the starting page and within the path specified here will be ignored. Leave blank to include all pages below the starting page.

For example if your starting page is 'http://mysite.com/somepath/index.html' and you specify a path to skip of '/otherpath' then pages that start with 'http://mysite.com/somepath/otherpath' will be skipped. Note that this includes pages such as 'http://mysite.com/somepath/otherpath/index.html' and 'http://mysite.com/somepath/otherpathaswell/index.html'. In this case if you just wish to check pages within 'otherpath' only then specify a path to skip of '/otherpath/'.

You can also use regular expression sytax here, but you must always start with '/' as the first character and note that '.*' is always automatically added to the end of whatever you enter.

(X)HTML validation

Select this option if you wish to use the HTML validator to validate each page against the W3C Markup Specifications or ISO/IEC definition. Total Validator includes an SGML parser and will test each page against the latest version of the W3C/ISO DTD (i.e. the specification) that you choose. It will also test against some of the things in the W3C/ISO specifications which cannot be covered by the W3C/ISO DTDs, although this is a work in progress at present.

The Auto-detect option is selected by default and uses the <!DOCTYPE> declaration on each page to select the DTD to use. If the <!DOCTYPE> is missing or unrecognised a best-fit algorithm will calculate the DTD that produces the fewest errors and will test against that instead.

The Best-fit option ignores any existing <!DOCTYPE> and uses the DTD that produces the fewest errors. This is a useful way of determining the best <!DOCTYPE> to attach to any page.

Accessibility validation

Select this option if you wish to validate each page against the W3C WAI Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 or US Section 508. There are three WAI levels to choose from covering the Priority 1, 2 and 3 guidelines.

Note that many of the guidelines, and especially the WAI Priority 3 ones, can only properly be tested through manual checking. That is why accessibility validators typically display lots of warnings with every page that is tested. Total Validator keeps things nice and simple and just displays errors and warnings for those tests that can be automated. So assuming that you've manually made your pages accessible in the first place Total Validator should help give a quick check if you've made any changes since.

Screenshots (Snapshot)

Select this option if you wish to take a screen shot of what your web page looks like in a particular browser for cross browser compatibility validation.

Select the browser/OS combination you wish to see your page in and an image will be added to your report. Screenshots will only be taken of your starting web page, or the page you have uploaded or cut and pasted.

If your web page is larger than will fit in the browser window, the page will be scrolled down and multiple screenshots returned.

By default the screenshot will be taken at a resolution of 1024x768 with the browser displaying in a full screen window. Where possible the various toolbars and status bars of the browser will be turned off to provide maximum screen coverage for your page. However by using the Advanced Form you can choose to have the snapshot taken at other resolutions.

Also by default the browser will also pause for 15 seconds in order for the page to fully load before the screen shot is taken. Again you can amend this value on the Advanced Form.

In order to prevent possible abuse the browser will not have permanent cookies turned on, nor will it have any plugins activated. Also because it is a static screen shot, animations, movies etc. will not be visible.

Spell check

Select this option to run the spelling validator if you wish to check the content of your pages for spelling mistakes. You can choose to check against either American or British dictionaries of over 150,000 words each, French of over 130,000 words, Spanish of over 85,000 words, German of over 160,000 words, or Italian of over 60,000 words. You can also upload any extra words that are not found in my dictionaries using the Own Dictionary option.

Note that when you use this option it will take longer to check your website. It is also advisable to only use this option once the web pages of the site are valid as the output can be quite verbose. So using it with the DTD and WAI Validation options is not recommended as it may be difficult to see any serious errors.

Upload dictionary

Click the Browse button to select and upload your own list of spellings to add to, or to replace the list given in the Spell Check option.

If you select a language from the Spell check option then words in the dictionary you supply will be used in addition to the standard dictionary for the selected language. If you leave the Spell check option blank, then any dictionary you upload will be the only one used for performing the spell check. In this way you could check against a language I don't currently support, or simply add your own set of industry specific words for the area your website covers.

The file that you upload cannot be larger than 2MB and must be a plain text file consisting of one word per line, with no duplicates.

Spelling options

By default certain types of words are not spell checked. This includes words that are all upper case (e.g. NASA), words that are mixed case (e.g. SpellCheck), and words that contain digits (e.g. Homer6). Use the 'Check upper case', 'Check mixed case' and 'Check words with digits' options respectively to include these types of words in the spell checking.

Words within attributes are not normally checked. However you can use the 'Check attributes' option to spell check text within the following attributes: alt, title, summary, label, prompt, and standby.

When a word is not found in the dictionary a list of suggestions is normally presented. But with the 'Ignore suggestions' option you can suppress this list.

By default if the web page has a language set and this language is not compatible with the language chosen for spell checking, then a warning is added to the page and the spell check skipped. But with the 'Ignore web page language' option you can force the spell check to proceed whatever the language of the web page. For reference:

American or British spell check runs when web page language set to 'en' or 'eng'
French spell check runs when web page language set to 'fr', 'fre', or 'fra'
Italian spell check runs when web page language set to 'it' or 'ita'
Spanish spell check runs when web page language set to 'es', 'esl', or 'spa'
German spell check runs when web page language set to 'de', 'deu', or 'ger'

Check for broken links

If you choose this option (selected by default) Total Validator will check each link on each page to ensure that it isn't broken.

Note that checking links can often be a time consuming process, especially if you have broken links on your pages. See the timeout option below to help speed this up.

Links to all resources such as CSS files, images, and scripts are checked as well as links to HTML files. Because the same link/resource may appear on many pages, a record of each link is kept to reduce the chance that the same link is tested more than once.

Report redirects

When checking for broken links you can use this option to additionally report warnings for any links that are 'redirects' to another place.

These are reported as warnings as they are not strictly errors. But because a redirected link can often become obsolete and so broken it may be wise to replace any such links with the ones being redirected to.

Three types of redirects are reported: Permanently Moved (301), Temporarily Moved (302), and See Other (303).

Timeout

When checking for broken links then if a page doesn't respond within 20 seconds it is recorded as broken. If you link to pages on particularly slow Web Servers, then you can use this option to increase the time Total Validator waits before recording it as a broken link.

You can also reduce the time down to 10 seconds if you wish. The advantage of doing this is that the whole process may finish a lot quicker if you do have broken links, but there is a danger that some slow links will be reported as broken.

The value that you enter here must be an integer (whole number) from 10 to 120 representing the number of seconds to wait for a response for a link before reporting it as broken. If you leave it blank it will default to 20 seconds.

Show on success

Normally pages with no problems are not displayed in detail. Use this option to display the layout of good pages. This can be useful if you have a redirected site and are unsure as to what has been validated.

In addition when checking more than one page it also provides a link to each page on the main report.

Show warnings

Normally the output report of a web page only displays errors that were found. With this option it will also show warning messages for those problems which are not strictly errors, but which could help to make your pages better.

Note that spell checking problems are displayed as warnings, and these will always be displayed when you spell check your page, whatever the setting here. The same also applies when reporting redirects

Short report

The default report displays all the lines in the web page formatted so that you can quickly find where problems are and correct them. However, some people prefer to only see those lines with problems on, typically due to familiarity with other validation services. Use this option if you wish to generate a short report displaying only those lines with problems on.

Hide content

Normally the output report of a web page displays the content as well as tags on the page. However you can use this option to hide the content of the web page. Setting this option may make it easier to locate and resolve problems.

Note that if you are spell checking the content, then any content with spelling mistakes in will be always displayed whatever the setting of this option.

Ignore errors/warnings

If you use Total Validator and it reports that there are 'errors' in your site that you are happy to live with, then use this option to stop them appearing. In this way you can clean up the reports produced to make them more useful to you. You could also ignore any errors/warnings that you think are errors in Total Validator itself, although I would prefer it if you could let us know so I can fix them so that everyone will benefit.

This value you supply must be a comma separated list of errors and/or warnings to ignore. For example:

E601, W600, E404

Once you've seen how the errors/warnings are reported I'm sure you'll understand what to put in here.

User/Password

Many websites have secure areas that use BASIC, DIGEST or Windows (NTLM) authentication to protect them. In order to validate pages within these areas, enter the required user name and password here.

When connecting to a server using Windows (NTLM) authentication you also need to supply a domain name. In this case enter the domain name and user name separated by a backslash into the user name field. For example 'MYDOMAIN\myuser'.

Because I don't yet provide an SSL connection, it may be possible for someone to intercept what you enter on the form. So I suggest for security reasons that you only provide temporary authentication details, or download a copy of the desktop tool to perform the validation.

Note that currently you can only supply one user name/password combination.