Section 73. Validate Your Site

73. Validate Your Site

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

17 Organize Your Site's Content

71 Configure the Settings to Publish Your Site

72 Publish Your Page

SEE ALSO

33 Use the HTML Editor

48 Use the HTML Views

51 Spell Check the Document

After you have your pages uploaded, you might think you are done, but you have one more important step. Web pages are not that difficult for the most part, but there are a few things that make them "break" that you'll want to catch right away. Doing a quick quality assurance test will ensure your pages are doing what you expect them to do.

73. Validate Your Site

We covered checking your page for misspellings earlier in Chapter 8, "Work with Text." The only thing that might be worse than misspelled words on your page is links to pages and graphics that are not in the right places in your site or that you have forgotten to upload.

Another thing you'll want to do is check your page in more than one web browser to see that the page looks the same or at least looks equally good in different browsers. Remember there are more browsers out there than the one or two that you like to use and they do not all display things the same way. Someone using Netscape Navigator on a Macintosh is probably going to have a different view of a page than someone using Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows . Although you can't always make them the same, you can check to at least ensure that each user will have a similar experience, and that you will not have things on your page that work in only one browser.

Although it has been popular to author for one browser or another and then label the site as " best viewed in whatever browser ," try to author for all the browsers you can. Usually, issues are pretty easy to fix after you know they exist.

1.	View Your Home Page in Netscape Navigator Open Netscape and go to your site at your server and view your home page.
2.	View Your Home Page in Internet Explorer Open Internet Explorer and go to your site at your server and view your home page.
3.	Place the Windows Side by Side and Compare Differences Place the two windows side by side and notice the differences. As you move your cursor around in the Internet Explorer version of the page, you get the Yahoo! GeoCities banner that follows the cursor around. I added that to the page in the Yahoo! PageBuilder . In the Netscape page, there is no banner that follows the cursor like in Internet Explorer . The page is the same code, but the cursor-following banner is an ActiveX control that works in one browser and not in another. You also notice the type looks different between the two browsers. In Netscape , the type for the body looks slightly smaller than it does in Internet Explorer . The headline " Taco the Chook " is quite different between the two browsers. The reason for the difference is that the code for the text has a typeface set in Courier , which is the name of the font on some machines; however, some machines have Courier New and not Courier installed. Small difference, but Netscape knows how to display the font when the exact font is not available. However, Internet Explorer doesn't know to try Courier New when it can't find Courier on the viewer's machine. (To find the difference for yourself, go to the page in Composer and view the HTML source view. Check the top of the page and see what the font is set to in the source code. You can change the font by typing in the exact font name in the code where it says Typeface = "Courier" and changing that to Typeface = "Courier New" and resaving the file.) When you check pages, you can find problems such as this early or at least know they are there before one of your site visitors points out the differences to you.
4.	Check Each Link In either Internet Explorer or Netscape (or your other favorite browser), click on the links under My Favorite Links one by one and make sure each goes to the correct site. Links on the Web "rot" over time, which means that you might initially be able to link to pages, but over time, people who own those sites might stop working on them or change their web addresses, or the computers that host the files go down for some reason. You'll want to check your site every once in a while to be sure the links work.
5.	Check Your Email Address and Phone in Both Browsers In both browsers, scroll down and make sure your email address is correct. If you have a business, you might want to double-check the phone number you have on your page as well. No point in a business website if no one can reach you!
6.	Check Your Graphics in Both Browsers In both browsers, check that all your graphics are on the page and that they look as you intend them to look. If the graphics were not uploaded with the page, you'll see a blank box with a red X in the corner in Internet Explorer , and a blank box with a small, multicolored icon in Netscape .
7.	Organize Your Friends to Check Your Site The final test after doing your own quality assurance is to ask a few of your friends to give the site a look. Invariably, people will find problems with your site, so getting your friends to look at the page before you call it "done" will almost always uncover a problem or two that you didn't catch.