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Hi.

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Today we're gonna talk
about the very important,

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but often overlooked process
of validating your site.

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What I mean by that is it's time for
us to check your code.

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So why do we wanna validate?

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I like to call browsers
the helicopter parents of programming.

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So a lot of times you're gonna be writing
up your code and then you'll stop and

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you'll check and it looks great.

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And then you write some more code and
you stop and you check.

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And it looks great.

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And by the sheer fact that it looks so
good, you assume you must be right.

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But the p problem is, browsers
are programmed to kind of look for

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your errors and fix them.

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The problem with this is that,
not all browsers fix things the same way.

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It's also important to remember
that not everyone is accessing your

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page with traditional browsers.

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So as your page becomes more complex,
these little hidden problems,

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those little hidden errors that
the browsers are hiding, can become

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devastating to people who are trying
to access them with different software.

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So there are 3 approaches for
validating your code for consistency.

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One is to validate what we call the URI or
the URL.

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Another is to validate by your file name
which means instead of giving you're URL

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you can actually upload
your file to check it.

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The third way is what I
called by Direct Input.

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So, let's go ahead and
run through an example very quickly.

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In this side I'm gonna use
is called the validator.

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All right.

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So, if you check here, we can start
off by going to the validator.w3.org.

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As you can remember,
the w3 is really the association for

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trying to make sure that everyone
sticks to the same standards.

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And here are three options.

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We can validate by URI,
the validate by file upload, and

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the validate by direct input.

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Now this is a somewhat important choice.

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Because for some of you, you may
not decide to buy a hosting system,

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in which case you can not give it a URL.

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You can't type in C:// it

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just doesn't work when you put anything
that's specific to your computer.

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So instead I'm going to show you
an example of validate by direct input.

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So let's start by looking at
the page we're gonna validate.

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Over here I have my little picture
of Ashtabula with the beach.

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And as you can see, it looks pretty good,

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you don't see any problems with it
as you kind of go back and forth.

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But let's see what happened when
I actually grab all this code.

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So if you want this shortcut,
this works for almost everyone.

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I'm gonna go ahead and
do control-A and control-C.

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Head back over here and
when I put it in and

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I click on check, once I start going
down you can see this looks good.

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Right away it says you have an error and
that error says stray end tag, and

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that's for a section.

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In most cases,
the validators can kind of give you a clue

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as to which line you've messed up on,
so let's go back and check the code.

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When I go over here and
I go down to line 25.

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Oops.

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Go up a little bit here.

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Nope, still nothing there.

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Got really long lines.

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Oh, the validator's right.

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As you can see,
I accidentally put section twice.

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What I really meant was to have an end
section here and a beginning section here.

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So let's go ahead and get rid of that.

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I will save, I will grab it all again and
let's try above putting in a new input.

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I'm actually gonna refresh.

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Go back here.

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And let's see if I have
better luck this time.

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Good, good.

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No errors or warning to show, so
I'm just going to go ahead and

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put my page back out there.

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So this is really just
the simplest way to go in and

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make sure the syntax of
your code is correct.

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Now, I kinda gave you a really simple
example where I only had one error.

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What typically is going to happen is
that it's gonna generate lots and

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lots of errors.

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And what I want to happen is make sure
that you don't freak out when you see all

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of them.

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The reason is, is because error
is what we call as propagate.

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The checker gets confused.

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When you see one error at the top, it
kind of leads to a whole bunch of errors.

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So what you wanna do,

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is you always wanna fix the first
error that the validator saw.

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Once you fix that,
there's a really good chance

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that the 52 errors it detected
have now dropped down to 12 or 11.

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Now, there's also the chance
that once you fix one error,

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it's gonna be able to see
that you had 20 or 30 more.

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But again, work on it step by step.

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If the error that the validator gives you
isn't as clear as the one that I just saw,

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what you can do is search online and
in the different forums.

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Because I can assure you that other
people have seen the same errors before.

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So what you want to do right now, actually
let's go back here, is let's go ahead and

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try validate file by URI.

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Pick your favorite site and
go ahead and type it in.

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I'm going to go ahead and put in, not my
own because I'm pretty sure it validates.

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I'm going to put in
http://www.umsi.umich.edu, so

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my boss can get mad at me when I show
his site potentially doesn't validate.

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Right away you can see that' it's
going to find a lot of errors.

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No matter what site you put in,
particularly if it's a very popular site,

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you're gonna see that there
are a lot of errors in that big,

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the sites don't validate.

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Let's make sure your sites
are better than theirs.

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So it's one thing to validate for
what we call syntax.

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It's another question to validate for
what we call accessibility.

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Again, we've talked about how
important it is to make sure that

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your sites are accessible to
the greatest number of people.

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So one of the places you can go to
check that is wave.webaim.org, and

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it's a site for you to go and
validate you accessibility.

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So let's take a look at that one again.

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I go up here, and I go to wave,
got web accessibility.

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What you need to do here is,
you can't upload your code by file,

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or just by the code itself,
you need to put in a URL.

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So i'm gonna go ahead and
go to that same one we did before which

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was the beaches.

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And put it in here.

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And you can see I didn't get any errors,
but I did get a couple of alerts.

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And the alerts were
simply telling me that.

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I'm not sure if your alternative text
is quite as good as it should be.

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And also, another point is saying
you have the same, a redundant link,

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which means you have the same link twice.

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So, right now everything looks
good as far as syntax and

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the very high level of accessibility for
the semantics.

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So, one of the nice things about
the accessibility validation is that it

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gives you an idea of things that you
haven't really thought about before but

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the downfall is that it
only works on hosted pages.

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So validated sites
are always more robust and

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more accessible than those
sites that don't validate.

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So, as a coder it is your job to
make sure that you go to these

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different validation sites and
fix your code to be up to standards.

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If you're not coding it is also
important for you to visit the sites

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that you go to on a regular basis and
go ahead and validate those.

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Giving you a real sense of the different
ways, people feel the importance or

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not importance of making their
site accessible to everybody.

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Good luck.