Maintainer of the current W3C HTML Checker (validator) here. I think it's important to understand the intended purpose of the current HTML checker, which is different from the purpose of the legacy W3C Markup Validator.
The purpose of the checker is documented at https://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html#why-validate:
The core reason to run your HTML documents through a conformance checker is simple: To catch unintended mistakes—mistakes you might have otherwise missed—so that you can fix them.
Beyond that, some document-conformance requirements (validity rules) in the HTML spec are there to help you and the users of your documents avoid certain kinds of potential problems.
There are some markup cases defined as errors because they are potential problems for accessibility, usability, interoperability, security, or maintainability—or because they can result in poor performance, or that might cause your scripts to fail in ways that are hard to troubleshoot. Along with those, some markup cases are defined as errors because they can cause you to run into potential problems in HTML parsing and error-handling behavior—so that, say, you’d end up with some unintuitive, unexpected result in the DOM
Validating your documents alerts you to those potential problems.
So as far as your question about "are better approaches to ensure contemporary standards-compliant markup", the answer is that it's not an either-or thing; there are a variety of approaches and the W3C HTML Checker is just one of them, and its goal isn't to be the single way to determine anything but instead to just help you catch mistakes you might otherwise miss and that might cause unexpected problems for your users.
As far as ways to get alerted to specific device issues or browser-implementation issues, we don’t have good automated checking tools for that, but a couple of things which are huge help there are:
https://caniuse.com/ — detailed information about the level of support for particular web-runtime features in different browsers, and in different versions of those browsers, and in release of the browsers for mobile devices vs desktop
https://wptdashboard.appspot.com/ — current test results across all major browser engines for dozens of web-runtime features/specs; if https://caniuse.com/ doesn’t have information about a particular feature, you can look through this dashboard and browse to the directory that has tests for that feature, and find whether a browser passes the tests for the feature
But as far as good automated tools we do actually have for checking other things, here are two:
- https://validator.w3.org/i18n-checker/ — W3C Internationalization Checker
- https://observatory.mozilla.org/ — for doing a security assessment of the content of your site
I recently faced a problem with mentioned above W3C HTML Checker. I respect a huge amount of work that was done by author of this validator, but it did not allow me in any way a tag <script type="text/vbscript" src="file.vbs">. It was said to change type value to empty string, a JavaScript MIME type, or module, which makes my page useless.
I know than VBScript language is rarely used now, it was just a test page, but let me share with you less tricky alternative, as good as the first one for HTML error checking.
Maintainer of the current JsonFormatter (validator) is here
Google DCM HTML5 Validator will be deprecated without a replacement March '21..
Our studio relies on this to make sure creatives will not be rejected when uploaded to DCM. Anyone know of any alternatives? Thanks!
EDIT: Nevermind! deprecation postponed, thanks to anyone who raised concerns..
Google is baking it in to cm on the advertising side and bet they will have something similar on the studio side. It was supposed to roll out end of last year I’ll see if I can find an update.
What the fuuuxck ...
Edit: possible they are porting this over to the platforms instead of being stand alone but still checking
Hey all! Wondering what your thoughts are on ad validation. Reason being is because we are evaluating our current process and determining if we can do this faster.
We currently request our graphic design team (external agency) to send us all the files in a folder in a GWD format (includes json files). Then we have to import that into Google Web Designer, so that we can use the built in ad validator, and then publish and connect to Campaign Manager. This process can become quite tedious because we have to do these 1 by 1 and also connect backup creatives. So the process of open + validation + backup image + publishing creative & connecting to CM, all that can take maybe 1-2 minutes per creative. When you're talking about 30-60 creatives, that's a lot of time.
The alternative we are considering is to instead use the standard zip file format for HTML5 files, then batch validate with a tool like h5validator.appspot.com, then batch upload the files into CM. Assuming the files pass validation, that same process might take 5-10 minutes at most for hundreds of creatives.
So, questions here:
Is the GWD built-in validator any different than a tool like h5validator? If so, how?
How necessary would you say the html5 validation is?
Do you have any other methods of efficiently validating and uploading HTML5 creatives into Campaign Manager?
Thanks for the input fellers!
You can download a vnu.jar release for checking HTML5 documents offline.
See https://github.com/validator/validator/releases/latest for the actual download file, and see https://validator.github.io/validator/ for more information
So far W3C has only published the DTD up to HTML 4.01.
Download libs: http://validator.w3.org/sgml-lib.tar.gz
In September 2012, the W3C proposed a plan (wikipedia.org) to release a stable HTML5 Recommendation by the end of 2014 and an HTML 5.1 specification Recommendation by the end of 2016.
Therefore I believe that the libs for HTML5 are coming this year.
Meanwhile you can use an unofficial DTD file, available here: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html5-dtd.html
Hey all! Wondering what your thoughts are on ad validation. Reason being is because we are evaluating our current process and determining if we can do this faster.
We currently request our graphic design team (external agency) to send us all the files in a folder in a GWD format (includes json files). Then we have to import that into Google Web Designer, so that we can use the built in ad validator, and then publish and connect to Campaign Manager. This process can become quite tedious because we have to do these 1 by 1 and also connect backup creatives. So the process of open + validation + backup image + publishing creative & connecting to CM, all that can take maybe 1-2 minutes per creative. When you're talking about 30-60 creatives, that's a lot of time.
The alternative we are considering is to instead use the standard zip file format for HTML5 files, then batch validate with a tool like h5validator.appspot.com, then batch upload the files into CM. Assuming the files pass validation, that same process might take 5-10 minutes at most for hundreds of creatives.
So, questions here:
Is the GWD built-in validator any different than a tool like h5validator? If so, how?
How necessary would you say the html5 validation is?
Do you have any other methods of efficiently validating and uploading HTML5 creatives into Campaign Manager?
Thanks for the input fellers!