Web Page Validation

A How-To Guide for the Complete Beginner

Welcome to the Validator

What's a Validator?

An HTML validator is a tool that is used to determine if a web page complies with HTML standards. For this tutorial, we will use the W3C validator. True, there are others, but this one is the most official.

W3C Markup Validation Service
The W3C validator can be found at validator.w3.org

How to Use the Validator

You will notice that there are three ways to enter HTML to be validated:

Validate by URI
Enter the URL of the web page to be validated (only works for pages already on the internet)
Validate by File Upload
Select an HTML file on your computer
Validate by Direct Input
Copy and paste or type html directly into the validator

Just click the check button, and see the results. You should see something like one of these two screens:

Error found while checking this document as HTML 3.2! This document was successfully checked as HTML 3.2!
Three guesses which one passed and which one failed