The CurrCon Java Applet displays prices on this
web page converted with today’s exchange rates into your local international currency,
e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees…
CurrCon requires an up-to-date browser
and Java version 1.8, preferably 1.8.0_131.
If you can’t see the prices in your local currency,
Troubleshoot. Use Firefox for best results.
CSE (Computer Science and Engineering)
HTMLValidator Pro 17.02Last revised/verified:2017-03-22is the HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) validator I use to
check my *.html web pages for syntax errors. It also checks *.css style sheets. It is produced by A I
Internet Solutions aka htmlvalidator.com. Albert
Wiersh of A.I. has been extremely helpful over the years whenever I had a problem or suggestions for new
features. CSE does not currently
stand for or mean anything (other than just being part of the name), but when the program was originally named,
it stood for CSE
Why bother with validation if you are not obsessive-compulsive? Because when you
clear up all the picky syntax errors, your website will work with any browser trouble free. Otherwise it will
work only with the browser or browsers you explicitly tested it with. Further, it could stop working with the
next release of a browser. Browsers are buggy enough without loading them down with malformed
HTML.
HTMLValidator is extremely configurable. You can get it to ignore picky errors for now, then when you have the
big problems with your site cleaned up, turn them back on. You can also make it super picky, so that your
HTML
is easier to process with programs, or to gradually migrate your site to XHTML (extensible Hypertext Markup Language).
Trial/Buy
There are five ways you can learn what it does, listed here in increasing order of
commitment.
HTML
Validator options
HTML Validator Options
cost
click
Version
Notes
online
Try validating some of your web pages online. This is done with free lite version. You don’t have
to download anything, but the web page you validate must be posted on web.
Lite
Download the free lite version and use it for as long as you like. It won’t expire. You normally
use it to validate HTML
on your hard disk before you upload your pages to your website. though you can also use it to validate web
pages, (even other people’s) already posted on the web.
Read the HTMLValidator FAQ. You will discover the extreme
configurability. You can control the degree of pickiness so you don’t have to fix everything at once,
just set the filters fine enough to get the worst problems cleaned before you move on to the pickier
stuff.
Standard
Download the trial standard version. It will work for 30 days to let you
evaluate. You might choose this first over the pro edition just you would not be overwhelmed with features
to start.
Pro
Download the trial pro version. It will work for 30 days to let you evaluate.
It is fully functional. The worst that can happen is you have 30 days to clean up
your website. When the trial expires, your website will still be clean.
Standard
Buy the standard version. It would be suitable if you had under 1000 files to
keep validated. It does not have any hard limits.
Pro
Buy the pro version. I use the pro version because comes with the batch wizard. It would take forever
to validate my whole website file by file.
I thought you would like to see the prices on this webpage in
, but you can change that instantly, thanks to the Canadian Mind Products CurrCon Applet that you too could use on your
own website to display prices in any world currency using today’s exchange rates.
HTMLValidator comes in three versions. See this comparison chart to help you decide which
version you need.
Configuring
You have very fine control over what the validator is picky about. You can
configure it to ignore certain classes of error or certain blocks of HTML
with
<!--cseignore--> … <!--/cseignore--> tags.
(<cseignore> … </cseignore> are deprecated.)
(Unfortunately, <!-- cseignore --> … <!-- /cseignore --> with space, will not
work.)
I very much like this feature. It lets me bring my HTML
gradually into conformance. When I was in the early stages of cleanup I used to ask it not to bug about picky
stuff like missing </p> and using <ul>…
</ul> for indenting. Now I do ask it to be more picky.
Here’s how I configure it to demand balancing </li> tags.
Click Options ⇒ Configuration Editor ⇒ Edit ⇒ Tag Names.
On the top right, Select li (020) with the drop down box on the right (not the
box on the left) as the Tag Name Being Configured
On the right, select the Required end tag radio
button.
You’ll probably want to repeat this for all li tags whose context is
distinguished with a number.
Save the configuration file to a different filename to make sure it
doesn’t get overwritten if the CSEHTML
Validator is reinstalled or updated.
The most important parameter to configure in the batch processor is Tools ⇒ Batch
Wizard ⇒ Options ⇒ Batch Wizard Options ⇒ General ⇒ Miscellaneous ⇒ max targets
which controls the maximum number of files that will be processed in a batch.
In Options ⇒ Validation Engine Option ⇒ Options
I set check for high ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character on.
I set require lower case tags and attributes. Consistency never hurts.
I set required quoted attribute values. This consistency helps later with any search/replace or one-off
text processing programs.
Set the max number of errors and warnings before aborting at Tools ⇒ Tools Options
⇒ Message Output.
The configuring options are squirreled in over seven different places. Check out:
Tools ⇒ Tools Options: mostly checkboxes
Tools ⇒ Tools Options ⇒ Config file ⇒ Edit configuration: which
tags are mandatory.
Tools ⇒ Batch Wizard ⇒ options ⇒ Batch Wizard options: mostly
checkboxes. Max files in a batch.
Options ⇒ Editor Options; mostly how the editor looks.
Options ⇒ Validator Engine Options ⇒ options: same as Tools ⇒ Tools Options
Options ⇒ Configuration Editor ⇒ edit configuration: same as
Tools ⇒ Tools Options ⇒ Config file ⇒ Edit configuration
Unfortunately, when you install a new version of the program, usually your old customisations are lost unless
you make special provisions.
The program itself installs as: X:\Program Files (x86)\HTMLValidator170\cse170.exe
Other files in:
"C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\AI Internet Solutions\CSE HTML Validator\17.0\", Files you can configure
include:
batchreporttemplate.css
cssinsertercfg.txt
htmlvalV170.cfg: I suggest backing up this file in some permanent data directory
so it will be backed up and won’t get lost on reinstall.
javascriptinsertercfg.txt
msgidcfg.xml
options.veo: I suggest backing up this file in some permanent directory so it
will be backed up and won’t get lost on reinstall.
phpinsertercfg.txt
taginsertercfg.txt
tidyprofiles.xml
userinsertercfg.txt
Make sure you periodically clean out:
C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\AI Internet Solutions\CSE HTML Validator\17.0\batchreport*.html
& and &
By default, one thing the validator will complain about is &s in your CGI (Common Gateway Interface) URLs; it wants you to spell them out as
&. The CGI
server will still see them as plain & since your browser converts them back to
plain &. I wrote a free utility do correct this error for you automatically
called Amper.
Gotchas
Make sure you uncheck the batch wizard option After validating a target list, set
process to ‘No’ for the targets with no errors, warnings or bad links. Otherwise your
validations will gradually stop working.
The check for high ASCII
characters is done without regard to tags. Unfortunately, this means you can’t use <!--cseignore--> to suppress high ASCII
error messages.
Uncheck Options ⇒ Validator Engine Options ⇒ Validator Engine Options ⇒
Enable JavaScript Lint messages to disable JavaScript checking. The problem is if your
HTML
contains VBScript, the validator gets confused and thinks it is JavaScript and complains wherever the syntax
differs from JavaScript.
Command Line Options
You can do quite a bit with HTMLValidator from the command line.
The utility is called X:\Program Files (x86)\HTMLvalidator170\cmdlineprocessor.exe. The following table gives
a quick summary of the most commonly used options. See the HTMLValidator help for details.
HTMLValidator command line options
HTMLValidator Command Line Options
Option
Meaning
-1
Display engine options
-2
launch configuration editor
-3
Display batch wizard options
-4
Display editor options
-b target.lst
run batch wizard on this batch target.
-b
launch batch wizard and await further instructions.
-c file.html
convert file to format of last saved file.
-f cmds.txt
submit multiple command lines at once from a summary command file.
-l file.html
convert file to lower case.
-o file.html
open the file in the editor, but don’t validate it.
-q
quit.
-s file.html
strip tags from file.
-t file.html
use template tool on file.
-u file.html
convert file to upper case.
-v file.html
validate then display results in a viewer, e.g. notepad. You probably don’t want
to do this.
I have not found a way to load a file into the editor and validate it. I wish there were ways to load a file,
validate and exit if all is well. I also wish that were true for a batch, but when there were some files in the
batch with problems, they should be loaded in the editor, automatically, ready to correct.
Tips
To configure which browser to use for the Batch Reports, configure the browser in Windows settings.
Validation does not replace proof-reading. There are many sorts of errors that validation cannot catch
including missing or scrambled text, using the wrong word, leaving off the & on
the front of entities, ugly layouts, text with the wrong css class, a spelling error inadvertently added to the
list of good words, inconsistencies in style… Nothing beats just perusing the pages from time to time in
a variety of browsers looking for anomalies.
Use copy/paste the file name in the batch validation browser report to revalidate the bad document in
regular mode, where you can correct the errors in its editor.
You can download spelling dictionaries for additional languages as *.adm files.
11 languages come built-in.
Just unzip them and copy them into X:\Program Files (x86)\HTMLValidator170\Dictionary\.
Invoke validator on a single file like this:
If there are a large number of documents needing correction, copy/paste the list from the batch validation
browser report to a file and tidy them to look like this:
and save them in a file badlist.txt. Then submit the entire file with:
rem submit list of -o (open) commands to HTMLValidator command line processor%HTMLValidatorDir\cmdlineprocessor.exe -f badlist.txt
Rem -30-
Use the recent feature the batch validator to only check files that have changed
within n days where n can be a fraction. This will save needlessly checking files over and over. I now run a
global check of all recently changed files several times a day. This helps me keep on top of any errors. Create
a batch descriptor to validate your whole site, but limit it to changes within the last day. Run this before
every upload. It will complete quite quickly and this habit will prevent you from ever uploading bad
HTML.
Invoke the batch processor from the command processor like this:
Validate your Webpages Free
CSEHTML
Validator Window.
Check your document online with CSEHTML
Validator Lite.
Custom Features
I have talked the HTMLValidator people into implementing some new features, but they are not in the standard
edition. You have to ask for them specially.
This script track of which documents it has already validated and when. Then it could transparently avoid
revalidating documents that have not changed since the last validation. You could ask to revalidate everything
and it would be clever enough just to revalidate what has changed since the last validation, even if different
documents were validated in different batches. It would look as if it had revalidated everything very quickly.
You handle this by customising the following javascript and telling the batch validator to invoke it by putting
the name of the script file in Target List Options ⇒ user
functions file.
Documents that fail to pass a batch validates are automatically loaded into the editor for correction.
Without the feature, you have to type their names one by one to load them for correction. You handle this
telling the batch validator to invoke the following script file by putting the name of the script file in
Target List Options ⇒ user functions file.
Here is my wish list of features primarily I would like to make HTMLValidator better at spell checking. I have
asked many times before and been rejected, however, I am eternally optimistic these low priority wishes will
eventually percolate to the top. The most important items are at the top of the list.
Treat entities embedded inside words as if there were the equivalent Unicode before looking them up in the
spell check dictionary.
Allow some way to mark blocks of text with magic comments or styles to request they not be spell
checked.
Pay attention to the lang markup and use the correct language dictionary. If there is no
corresponding dictionary, suppress checking.
Batch check a set of documents for spelling. Auto close those without error. Leave those with errors open
in the editor.
Spell checker than can handle tags embedded inside words, e.g. when acronyms are explained, e.g.
URL
Command line operations fail if you move to a different directory without shutting HTMLValidator down first. It should let you leave it running all the time while you move from
directory to directory feeding it files to validate.
Consolidate all the configuration menus in one place and reorganise them so finding something to configure
is easier to find. Assign configuration options short names rather than numbers.
When doing a spell check run, it would be nice if HTMLValidator allowed you to you
to type in a word not in the dictionary to correct. Currently you must stop the spell checker, correct the
problem with editor, then restart the spell checker.
Scripts
HTMLValidator allows you to write little chunks of JavaScript and insert them to customise the way
HTMLValidator works. I use two scripts. The first keep track of which of my files have already been successfully
validated and have not since changed. Why a do a batch validation, such files don:t have to be revalidated. It
makes the whole process at least an order of magnitude faster.
This script automatically loads files into the editor if they fail validation.
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