Checking Your HTML
The
W3 XHTML Validator is a nice and easy tool that you can use to check the validity of your HTML, and it's been around for quite some time. All you have to do is enter your HTML to be checked, and it will report on whether there are any discrepancies or not. This can be something as simple as using & when you should have used & to display it, so it's really quite a handy tool for finding errors that you might overlook normally.
You can't just paste the HTML you're going to be using at Smogon, however. This validator works by checking an entire page, not just portions of HTML. Therefore, if the display elements of the page aren't set up correctly, your HTML won't validate even if it is correct. Smogon obviously handles this when you add your code to the site, but that isn't much good if you want to check before you get somebody to cache your entry for you. With that in mind, I've thrown together a makeshift template for you to paste your work into.
HTML:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Article Test</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.smogon.com/media/global.css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.smogon.com/media/page.css" />
</head>
<body>
<!-- YOUR HTML CODE GOES HERE -->
</body>
</html>
It's pretty straightforward to use. Basically, you finish your HTML code as per usual, and paste it inside the <body> tags, or over the top of my "YOUR HTML CODE GOES HERE" comment. Note that the validator is only interested in your raw HTML, so if the standard header to Smogon documents (as below)
Code:
[title]
Blah Blah
[head]
<meta name="description" content="Blah blah blah" />
[page]
it's going to fail. So, while validating, either comment that bit out or remove it altogether. Just remember to add it in once the rest of your document validates.
Then it's just a matter of actually validating your document. You can either
upload it directly or simply copy and
paste your code directly. Note that if you validate by direct input, you'll receive a single warning even if the code is all correct which is to do with assumed character encoding. As long as the code actually passes in this case, you're fine since Smogon handles all of that anyway.
If you're Site Staff, you can actually just paste your HTML code as normal (ie. without using my template) and
validate your page directly, so that's worth keeping in mind too.
Hopefully this will help some of you out - it's always good to be able to check your code instead of flying blind. Post any comments, questions or problems here please. :)
