I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving break. We all got together, ate too much, had a wedding and ate too much again and now it's great to be back at work where I can get some rest!
I am a skeptic by nature. I sometimes feel like nobody in the room is more surprised or more pleased when we press that mighty [F12] key and a real, live, Web page loads and looks great! But what if something goes wrong?
Years ago, I was a mainframe computer operator and things went wrong almost every night. Something would blow up and I'd panic and call one of the Systems Analysts. "The big job just quit running!" I'd say, with probably more breathless drama than was really needed. "What does it say in the manual?" would come the reply. Rather than tell me how to fix the problem, he would tell me where to find it in the rack of books, and how to interpret what it said about the care and feeding of a mighty computer. I quickly learned to look up the problem first, and only if I didn't understand the manual to give the Analyst a call.
You might wonder how this applies to Web pages, since we don't have a manual for HTML. Well, we do, of a sort.
You can think of the WorldWide Web Consortium as sort of the company behind HTML, XHTML, CSS and several other technologies involved in serving up information online. The W3C, as it is known, provides an extensive online "manual" for each of the languages and protocols we use every day. Unfortunately, they are written more for people designing and building Web browsers than mere civilians like you and me. But for us there is something even more wonderful: The Validator.
Today, it is more important than ever that the markup we write is good. I don't mean inventive or original or even imaginative. I mean only that it conforms to the W3C standards. They have decided that Web pages should have <head>'s and <body>'s. You can create Web pages that don't have them, and they might work, today. But if you create pages that include them, they will work, today and tomorrow.
So if the page you see after pressing your [F12] key isn't quite what you had imagined, validate your page and see what kind of information comes back. There is a link in the footer of almost every UNL-templated page, to check that page for valid markup. I recommend you click that link and immediately check the option to Show Source and then re-validate your page. The reason for re-validating with visible Source is that so much of the information that appears on a templated page is Included. In Dreamweaver, we see only a single line of markup like this one: <!--#include virtual="sharedcode/bigfile.html" -->
The file bigfile.html could be one line long, or many hundreds of lines long. Either way, it is going to throw off the line count you see in Dreamweaver. So don't be surprised if the validator says you have an error on line #437 when your page in Dreamweaver is only 256 lines long. Also, don't be surprised if your error count is huge, at first. The results it records are cumulative, and if you make a big enough mistake, early enough in your page, everything from then on may be seen as a problem to the validator.
The validator will tell you not only what line, but in what column you are having a problem. Typical errors include un-escaped ampersand characters in URL strings, unclosed tag pairs and simple spelling errors. The validator will explain to you what it doesn't like and where it found it, you just need to match up the errors it sees with your own markup and make the changes. Changing & to & for example, will correct most problems with invalid URLs. Adding alt="alternate text" to images will fix most problems with invalid images, and so on.
Once you have got a page that validates, then you are in a place where a telephone call may be helpful. Validating your page goes a long way toward fixing display errors, as well as making your page much more accessible. Remember, we do more of this here at UNL than any other school we know of—so show a little pride and validate your pages before you finish.
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