Nikita the (Validation) Spider

November 5th, 2006 at 6:05 pm (Standards)

If you have ever tried to ensure that your website validates against its declared doctype, you probably know that it is a task that consumes a fair amount of time, even with tools like the HTML Validator or the Web Developer extensions for Firefox.

In comes Nikita the Spider, this web application performs bulk validation of the pages within a website. It can run unattended and have a report sent to an email address that you specify. Unfortunately, the site is unable to accept new requests since the its mention on 456 Berea Street.

Users will need to possess some technical knowledge in order to make sense of some of Nikita’s advanced configuration settings. While the descriptions go towards explaining what the individual options do, it might confuse the less technically inclined. In any case, the default settings are all you need to start using the tool.

Comments

Is IE7 finally going to play nice?

August 23rd, 2006 at 10:43 pm (Web)

According to Markus Mielke, the Program Manager for Internet Explorer 7, the development team has improved aka corrected implementation for CSS2. It remains to be seen whether the browser will finally end years of frustration for web developers who have had to grapple with years of rendering bugs on Internet Explorer. Chris Wilson has pointedly stated that while IE7 will not be ACID2 compliant, the product team is trying to remove the problems people have with IE. A year after Paul Thurott’s very public shaming of the IE7 Beta, he has changed his stance to a more conciliatory one, albeit still critical.

I have personally tried using IE7 on a Windows XP machine, the Vista interface looked out of place and it didn’t as intuitive as Firefox. I would imagine that it would be more pleasurable to interact with on Windows Vista (when it finally ships in 2030). I think the real test of standards compliance for IE7 would be after its release, when developers start to test against for real websites. Till then, given Microsoft’s track record for internet browsers, I’m not holding my breath.

Comments