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Webpage ValidationNo one likes broken links. Yahoo actually stipulate that your website must contain no broken links to be listed! You should spell check your website for embarrassing misspellings before it goes live! Arachnophilia has a built-in spell checker, although you'll need to add to the (small) dictionary as you go. You can use a program like Word to spell and grammar check, but actually make the changes using Arachnophilia. A website analyser will check to see if there are 'dead' or 'broken' links in your website by checking that each <a href...> tag has a valid target - i.e. it's a real file. This is just as essential as spell checking! You can use Arachnophilia's built-in checker (Go to 'Tools', 'Analyse Site...'). Dreamweaver has a site checker. Xenu's Link Sleuth is free & brilliant... or try one of the sites listed below. You can choose to have the syntax of your pages checked, and I would recommend you do. The checking software can be a bit fussy though and give a lot of errors where things aren't very wrong... The effect of poor syntax is undefined, most browsers handle mistakes quite gracefully, but what works on one may cause problems on another. Mistakes, especially in tables, can slow down the rendering process noticably. The most common problems found by HTML syntax checkers are:
This basically means removing all double spaces and comments to reduct the size of each page. It does make a difference to the load times of your pages, and you may not want people reading your comments. This is optional. If you really don't want people to read your HTML you can find 'code mashers' that make code virtually unreadable to humans (by placing line breaks in funny places etc.)
Check out these sites for more info:
Check your website using one or more of the tools above. Ensure that, as a bare minimum, your pages don't contain spelling mistakes or broken links. |
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