Beyond validation
Validating one's Web pages is growing to become the usual quality check. But a Valid page without quality content is a nice, clean shell, but nonetheless empty.
Here are a few ideas and tools to help you with the other quality steps.
Think Content, think style, think navigation
Content : Data and Metadata
Tools that help
- The Markup Validator has an "outline" option, which can be useful to check rapidly that a page is well organized: if the outline does not make sense, chances are the document doesn't, either.
- Checking the level of data and metadata on a page made easy: the Semantics extractor analyses a documents and gives a summary of the information it contains.
Style
Modern Web authoring would not be very easy and efficient with just HTML. CSS has all the spice needed to make your interesting, well-organized documents become a feast for the eyes (and for printers, and projectors, and mobile devices, and screen readers!).
Tools that help
- Whether your style sheets are standalone or embedded in HTML documents, the W3C CSS Validation service will check them for you.
Navigation
Let us not forget that HTML is not only "Markup Language", but also "Hypertext". Hyperlinking is a powerful tool that makes navigation within a document (table of contents, jumping to a specific part of the document) or across documents very easy. Use it well.
Tools that help
- The Link Checker is a fine service that will check links and anchors in your Web pages, and will hunt link rot, typos and access control issues so that you don't have to. And it even works recursively.
Further Reading
The tools listed in this tip are hosted at W3C, but there are a lot of excellent integrated tools doing the same job. We are listing a few here for your information:
- Webthing's Site Valet does Markup validation, link checking, as well as accessibility checking.
- Illumit's WebLight also helps finding Markup problems and broken links
About the "QA Tips"
The W3C QA Tips are short documents explaining useful bits of knowledge for Web developers or designers, hosted and produced by the Quality Assurance Interest Group at W3C.
While the tips are carefully reviewed by the participants of the group, they should not be seen as anything else than informative bits of wisdom, and especially, they are not normative W3C technical specifications.
Learn more about the Tips, how to submit your own pearls of wisdom, and find all the other QA tips in the Tips Index.