blog.ashkool.com

The HTML Validator extension for Firefox has been an essential tool in my arsenal of web development tools. The extension has both the W3C algorithms (HTML Tidy and the SGML Parser) implemented, and it works locally (offline) for validating web pages. It eliminates the cumbersome uploading to W3C Validator service and shows instant results of the tests, pretty fast too (The largest page loaded took less than 1/100th second).

The HTML Validator has a nice debug window which not only shows the errors & warnings, but also shows tips on how to solve the errors, including small bits of demonstration code. It provides a wholesome learning experience about HTML standards.

The HTML Validator works flawlessly on Windows based systems, but on Linux, it faces a bit of trouble especially on Ubuntu. This is due to incompatibility of the LIBC++ version used to compile the extension and the one available on our system. The following steps will make the HTML Validator work on Ubuntu systems:

1. sudo apt-get install libxul-dev
2. sudo apt-get install libstdc++5
3. sudo apt-get install libnspr4-dev
4. At the end of /etc/profile, add the following line:
“export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH/usr/lib/xulrunner/”

Then restart Firefox. If the status bar icon still doesn’t turnup, restart your X session and you’ll have the validator ready.