Debug HTML code with iCab

Jun 27, '02 09:44:17AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

I've been building a website, and as part of my construction, I needed to look for HTML errors (missing end tags, etc.). I have found that iCab's error checking mechanism is wonderful for finding these problems with HTML. You can set it to your preference for which version of HTML specifications to use as a reference (from 2.0 to three varieties of 4.0).

Every page that you view gets either a red frowning 'smiley', a yellow 'unsure' face, or a green happy face. Clicking on the face (if it's red or yellow) brings up a window with error messages (red) and/or warnings (yellow). One nice feature is that iCab will open up the source code and highlight the offending code if you double-click on the error message.

Be sure to set the background color of the source code to white, though, or you won't be able to find the section of code that iCab highlights, as the highlight color is almost identical to the default gray background.

Using this feature, for example, I found that our favorite Mac OS X hints site has some missing quotation marks in its code for the alternate text of the logo:

<img src=http://www.macosxhints.com/images... ...alt=Mac OS X Hints>
I can't but imagine that properly formed code will render faster and/or more correctly in most browsers.

[Editor's note: Hmm, I don't see that those quotation marks are missing ... at least, they're not missing any more ;-)]

Comments (5)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20020627094417385