Page Validation The Easy Way

Since we redesigned our site a few years ago, I’ve done my best to ensure that pages validate as best as possible. We designed with XHTML 1.0 strict in mind, and at launch, at least, we met that goal on many pages.

The challenge is that we have many different people working on pages across several departments, and they are all not “web people,” so creating pages that comply with web standards isn’t their top priority. So, a few years back, we wrote a web app to help us with tracking pages, which I’d like to share with you today.

No fancy Web 2.0 stuff here, it’s straight-up ease of use for the only audience this tool has – me, Josh and our students. This page shows a list of pages that we need to check. It shows me if the page has been assigned to someone to fix, and what style sheet the page uses. The first step is to check the validity of any page. So, clicking on a link brings me to this page.

This page is made up of two frames. Let’s start with the bottom frame. It’s the W3C results of a validation test, which is pulled in automatically depending on the URL we feed it. Once the results are in, I can set the validation status of the page as well as see a history of the times we’ve checked this page. We are adding content to pages just about every day, so it’s not uncommon for a page not to validate from time to time. Our code also pulls the style sheet the page is using, so we also know if the page CSS was changed at some point.

Once the information is submitted, the window closes and our main app updates. Next, I need to assign these pages to someone, either myself or one of our students. I select the checkboxes next to the pages and select who will update these pages at the top of the form. At this point, the pages to be updated are automatically created as a new project in our homegrown web project management tool. The next time the student logs into the project system, they’ll see the pages they’ve been assigned and can start work on them.

It’s quick and easy and makes validation, as well as the sometimes annoying task of keeping up with validation, less of a burden.