Hi.
Today we're gonna talk about the very important,
but often overlooked process of validating your site.
What I mean by that is it's time for us to check your code.
So why do we wanna validate?
I like to call browsers the helicopter parents of programming.
So a lot of times you're gonna be writing up your code and then you'll stop and
you'll check and it looks great.
And then you write some more code and you stop and you check.
And it looks great.
And by the sheer fact that it looks so good, you assume you must be right.
But the p problem is, browsers are programmed to kind of look for
your errors and fix them.
The problem with this is that, not all browsers fix things the same way.
It's also important to remember that not everyone is accessing your
page with traditional browsers.
So as your page becomes more complex, these little hidden problems,
those little hidden errors that the browsers are hiding, can become
devastating to people who are trying to access them with different software.
So there are 3 approaches for validating your code for consistency.
One is to validate what we call the URI or the URL.
Another is to validate by your file name which means instead of giving you're URL
you can actually upload your file to check it.
The third way is what I called by Direct Input.
So, let's go ahead and run through an example very quickly.
In this side I'm gonna use is called the validator.
All right.
So, if you check here, we can start off by going to the validator.w3.org.
As you can remember, the w3 is really the association for
trying to make sure that everyone sticks to the same standards.
And here are three options.
We can validate by URI, the validate by file upload, and
the validate by direct input.
Now this is a somewhat important choice.
Because for some of you, you may not decide to buy a hosting system,
in which case you can not give it a URL.
You can't type in C:// it
just doesn't work when you put anything that's specific to your computer.
So instead I'm going to show you an example of validate by direct input.
So let's start by looking at the page we're gonna validate.
Over here I have my little picture of Ashtabula with the beach.
And as you can see, it looks pretty good,
you don't see any problems with it as you kind of go back and forth.
But let's see what happened when I actually grab all this code.
So if you want this shortcut, this works for almost everyone.
I'm gonna go ahead and do control-A and control-C.
Head back over here and when I put it in and
I click on check, once I start going down you can see this looks good.
Right away it says you have an error and that error says stray end tag, and
that's for a section.
In most cases, the validators can kind of give you a clue
as to which line you've messed up on, so let's go back and check the code.
When I go over here and I go down to line 25.
Oops.
Go up a little bit here.
Nope, still nothing there.
Got really long lines.
Oh, the validator's right.
As you can see, I accidentally put section twice.
What I really meant was to have an end section here and a beginning section here.
So let's go ahead and get rid of that.
I will save, I will grab it all again and let's try above putting in a new input.
I'm actually gonna refresh.
Go back here.
And let's see if I have better luck this time.
Good, good.
No errors or warning to show, so I'm just going to go ahead and
put my page back out there.
So this is really just the simplest way to go in and
make sure the syntax of your code is correct.
Now, I kinda gave you a really simple example where I only had one error.
What typically is going to happen is that it's gonna generate lots and
lots of errors.
And what I want to happen is make sure that you don't freak out when you see all
of them.
The reason is, is because error is what we call as propagate.
The checker gets confused.
When you see one error at the top, it kind of leads to a whole bunch of errors.
So what you wanna do,
is you always wanna fix the first error that the validator saw.
Once you fix that, there's a really good chance
that the 52 errors it detected have now dropped down to 12 or 11.
Now, there's also the chance that once you fix one error,
it's gonna be able to see that you had 20 or 30 more.
But again, work on it step by step.
If the error that the validator gives you isn't as clear as the one that I just saw,
what you can do is search online and in the different forums.
Because I can assure you that other people have seen the same errors before.
So what you want to do right now, actually let's go back here, is let's go ahead and
try validate file by URI.
Pick your favorite site and go ahead and type it in.
I'm going to go ahead and put in, not my own because I'm pretty sure it validates.
I'm going to put in http://www.umsi.umich.edu, so
my boss can get mad at me when I show his site potentially doesn't validate.
Right away you can see that' it's going to find a lot of errors.
No matter what site you put in, particularly if it's a very popular site,
you're gonna see that there are a lot of errors in that big,
the sites don't validate.
Let's make sure your sites are better than theirs.
So it's one thing to validate for what we call syntax.
It's another question to validate for what we call accessibility.
Again, we've talked about how important it is to make sure that
your sites are accessible to the greatest number of people.
So one of the places you can go to check that is wave.webaim.org, and
it's a site for you to go and validate you accessibility.
So let's take a look at that one again.
I go up here, and I go to wave, got web accessibility.
What you need to do here is, you can't upload your code by file,
or just by the code itself, you need to put in a URL.
So i'm gonna go ahead and go to that same one we did before which
was the beaches.
And put it in here.
And you can see I didn't get any errors, but I did get a couple of alerts.
And the alerts were simply telling me that.
I'm not sure if your alternative text is quite as good as it should be.
And also, another point is saying you have the same, a redundant link,
which means you have the same link twice.
So, right now everything looks good as far as syntax and
the very high level of accessibility for the semantics.
So, one of the nice things about the accessibility validation is that it
gives you an idea of things that you haven't really thought about before but
the downfall is that it only works on hosted pages.
So validated sites are always more robust and
more accessible than those sites that don't validate.
So, as a coder it is your job to make sure that you go to these
different validation sites and fix your code to be up to standards.
If you're not coding it is also important for you to visit the sites
that you go to on a regular basis and go ahead and validate those.
Giving you a real sense of the different ways, people feel the importance or
not importance of making their site accessible to everybody.
Good luck.