HTML validation tools for your SAP Portal

[hofmann]

HTML code gets generated by a wide range of SAP Products. To know if this HTML code is W3C valid or to better understand why the browser won't render the page as intended, you should run it against a validator service to find errors as early as possible during development. You may have little control over the generated HTML code when developing Web Dynpro applications, but when you customize the portal iViews from SAP (masthead, navigation) or create your own applications, you do have some control over the code.

W3C is offering online validator services:

• HTML
• CSS
• Mobile
• Feeds

These validators are accessed by a seperate URL, one for every service. Recently the W3C published a new service that integrates the checks in one URL: Unicorn

http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/

When you are using Firefox, you can use (as an example) HTML Validator to analyze the HTML code. This tool shows you the number of errors and warnings and gives a short description of the error. A nice feature is that it can clean up the page.

Some hints you should consider:

• write all HTML tags in lower case: and not . This also means that you should not mix upper and lower case:
  vs. in the same page
• provide the type attribute for Javascript:
• for images: provide the alt attribute. Even when your image won't get loaded (404 or 401), the user will see a description
• close all tags.