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When I'm developing a website locally sometimes I want to check if the html is valid but I haven't been able to find a good tool. I want it partial as a sanity check when I'm troubleshooting layout issues.

Can you please suggest a tool that can validate HTML offline? I'm not looking for validation inside of an IDE but something that will load the page from the web server.

Thank you!

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5 Answers

up vote 20 down vote accepted

You can download the source and/or packages direct from w3[1].

[1] http://validator.w3.org/source/

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+1, and they have a LOT of other really cool tools and libraries available for download. – Tim Post♦ Aug 1 '10 at 20:15
up vote 9 down vote

To save time I use a Firefox Extension called HTML Validator. It adds validation to your view source window, tells you errors and warnings in a bottom pane. Also puts an icon in the bottom of your window showing you a quick reference for yes/no on validation. If no, then you just view source and it shows you exactly what your errors are.

Also validates accessibility.

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Oh yeah. Validate as you go. Saves you an extra manual step on each page. Hasn't yet been updated for HTML5, though. – Grant Palin Aug 2 '10 at 6:24
up vote 4 down vote

Have you checked out HTML Tidy?

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This is a very good solution too; and since they provide binaries for almost all platforms it's also a good option for beginners. – fwa Aug 1 '10 at 21:43
up vote 4 down vote

You can validate HTML and CSS locally (and do a lot of other useful things) with the Web Developer Toolbar add-on for Firefox. It's also available for Google Chrome.

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This is just a quick way of submitting it to the W3C validator. Hardly 'offline'. – Kris Aug 1 '10 at 21:13
Apologies, I misread the question. You can validate locally, but not offline. – Virtuosi Media Aug 1 '10 at 21:26
up vote 1 down vote

In Debian/Ubuntu you can do:

sudo apt-get install w3c-markup-validator

This will get you the web interface.

If you want to validate from the console, edit /usr/share/doc/w3c-markup-validator/examples/validate.pl and install libwebservice-validator-html-w3c-perl. Now you can run validate.pl with an URL to validate.

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