Validating Your Page in Java

Drawing PDF 417 in Java Validating Your Page

<h1>The Oxen and the Wheels</h1> <h2>From Aesop s Fables</h2> <p> A pair of Oxen were drawing a heavily loaded wagon along a miry country road They had to use all their strength to pull the wagon, but they did not complain <p> <p> The Wheels of the wagon were of a different sort Though the task they had to do was very light compared with that of the Oxen, they creaked and groaned at every turn The poor Oxen, pulling with all their might to draw the wagon through the deep mud, had their ears filled with the loud complaining of the Wheels And this, you may well know, made their work so much the harder to endure </p>

Aha! Line 22 is supposed to be the end of the paragraph, but I somehow forgot the slash character, so the Validator thinks I m beginning a new paragraph inside the previous one, which isn t allowed This causes a bunch of other errors, too Because the Validator can t see the end of this paragraph, it thinks that all the rest of the code is inside this first paragraph Try changing the <p> of line 22 into a </p> and see if it works better:

<p> A pair of Oxen were drawing a heavily loaded wagon along a miry country road They had to use all their strength to pull the wagon, but they did not complain </p>

Figure 2-9: Hooray! We have a valid page!

Sometimes, that green bar makes little tears of joy run down my cheeks Congratulations! It s only the second chapter in this minibook, and you re already writing better Web pages than a lot of professionals Seriously, a Web page that validates to XHTML Strict is a big deal, and you deserve to be proud of your efforts The W3C is so proud of you that they offer you a little badge of honor you can put on your page Figure 2-10 shows more of the page you get when your page finally validates correctly You can see a little button and some crazy-looking HTML code

If you want, you can copy and paste that code into your page oxWheels5html has that special code added at the end of the body, shown in Figure 2-11 This little code snippet does a bunch of neat things, such as Establishing your coding prowess: Any page that has this image on it has been tested and found compliant to XHTML Strict standards When you see pages with this marker, you can be confident of the skill and professionalism of the author Placing a cool image on the page: You ll read how to add your own images in 6 of this minibook, but it s nice to see one already This particular image is hosted at the W3C site

Letting users check the page for themselves: When the user clicks the image, they re taken directly to the W3C Validator to prove that the page is in fact valid XHTML Strict Unfortunately, this link works only on pages that are posted to a Web server, so it doesn t work right on a page just sitting on your computer Scope out Book VIII for suggestions on finding and using a server

The W3C Validator isn t the only game in town Another great resource HTML Tidy can be used to automatically fix your pages You can download Tidy or just use the online version at http://infohoundnet/tidy Figure 2-12 illustrates the online version with oxWheels1html being loaded Unlike W3C s Validator, Tidy attempts to actually fix your page Figure 2-13 demonstrates how it suggests how the oxWheelshtml page should be fixed Tidy examines the page for a number of common errors and does its best to fix the errors However, the result is not quite perfect: Tidy adds a new meta tag, indicating the page was created by Tidy I always get nervous when a program I didn t write starts messing with my pages