JavaScript tool that validates your HTML and warns you in the web console | Hacker News Reader

JavaScript tool that validates your HTML and warns you in the web console

github.com

30 pointsbootslebaron11 comments

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Link to a CDN in your README, so your users can test the tool more easily.

It's not my tool, but do you know about rawgithub.com? Just use the Github version if all you're doing is testing.

https://rawgithub.com/philipwalton/html-inspector/master/dis...

I wouldn't encourage this, even for testing. Github isn't built to be a CDN -- it's not super performant.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5502540/should-github-be-...

rawgithub.com is not raw.github.com. You can read about it on the homepage: http://rawgithub.com/

Browser's web inspectors need to integrate this tool.

That would certainly be cool. But part of the value of this tool is its ability to customize it yourself.

Yes - it seems strange that this has not already been integrated into Google DevTools which I generally use. Perhaps there is a similar Chrome extension or Firebug add-in but have not see it.

Not the same thing but there is already a jslint Chrome extension <1> and a proposal to add jshint to DevTools itself <2>.

<1> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jslint-for-google-...

<2> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-chrome-develo...

Safari Web inspector is open source now, someone can integrate and submit a patch for it as well. I prefer Safari over Chrome.

Can you actually validate HTML from user mode javascript? Isn't the HTML that you can access from JS the result of the browser's parser doing various things to 'fix up' mangled/incorrect HTML, and map the HTML to the actual object model (tbody elements, for example)?

Yes, you are correct. It's impossible to validate HTML from DOM traversal alone because the browser has already parsed it and forgiven any errors it was able to. (I didn't choose this title and agree that it's a little misleading.)

Technically, you could validate the markup if you did an AJAX request for the current URL and parsed the result yourself; however, if your app is generated dynamically and rendered primarily client side, you'd be missing a lot of the alterations done by your JavaScript in that validation.

This is why I think both tools have their place.

I try address this issue in my blog post introducing HTML Inspector under the section "How is HTML Inspector different than the W3C Validator?" http://philipwalton.com/articles/introducing-html-inspector/

Makes sense! Being able to detect a subset of errors in dynamic HTML is a nice feature, even if you have to rely on a static validator like the W3's for syntax errors.

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