Checking to make sure a website or page is W3C valid and compliant hasn’t always been high on my list of tasks when building a new page or site in the past, until recently.

The company I work for now is very proud of the fact that most, if not all, of the pages on all of their sites are W3C valid to the Scrict standard. Its a good move I think – it makes the developers code better in the long run, so long as we’re always checking for valid code.

So, to check for valid code on a site, I’ve found a neat addon for Firefox called HTML Validator (original, eh?)

However, I have found it to be a little touch-and-go. Sometimes it just doesn’t seem to comply with W3C standards. So I decided to make a small Bookmarklet / Del.icio.us-style browser brookmark link for the current site you’re viewing. Simply make a new bookmark on your browser, and enter the following code as the bookmark URL:

javascript:(function(){f='http://validator.w3.org/check?uri='+encodeURIComponent(window.location.href)+'';a=function(){if(!window.open(f+'','deliciousuiv5','location=yes,links=no,scrollbars=yes,toolbar=no,width=700,height=550'))location.href=f+'jump=yes'};if(/Firefox/.test(navigator.userAgent)){setTimeout(a,0)}else{a()}})()

Clicking your new bookmark will bring up a new popup window with the URL of the current page you’re viewing, to validate against the W3C site. Neat!