Running a Compatibility Report

Expression Web knows right out of the box how to write clean Web pages that comply with the standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. The Compatibility Checker goes over your Web pages' code to make sure that everything is A-OK under the hood.

Tip 

The Compatibility Checker is a useful tool for bringing an older site up to today's Web standards because it can check for nonstandard ways of specifying formatting. It can also check for missing or deprecated tags (tags that still work but have been replaced by newer tags). We talk about updating old sites in Chapter 18. (You can find Chapter 18, which is a downloadable bonus chapter, on this book's Web page at http://www.dummies.com.)

To run a compatibility report on your Web site, follow these steps:

1. With a Web site open, choose Tools Compatibility Reports.

   The Compatibility Checker dialog box appears.

2. In the Check Where section of the dialog box, select the radio button next to the group of pages you want Expression Web to check.

   You can check the entire site in one pass, or you can select specific pages.

3. In the Check HTML/XHTML Compatibility With list box, choose the version of code rules you want to check your code against.

   This option defaults to the document type declaration (doctype) specified on the Authoring tab in the Page Editor Options dialog box. (Choose Tools Page Editor Options, and then click the Authoring tab.) It basically means "Which brand of HTML coding do you want to check your page's compatibility against?" By default, Expression Web writes your pages' code in XHTML Transitional, so you can just let Expression Web pick this option for you.

   If you need to know more about document type declarations, we explain them in a sidebar in Chapter 14.

4. Unless you're sure that you want to check your Cascading Style Sheet code against an earlier version, leave the Check CSS Compatibility option set to CSS 2.1.

   The Compatibility Checker checks only internal Cascading Style Sheets styles that are embedded in your Web pages. To check external style sheets, you need to run a CSS report. (We tell you how in Chapter 9.)

5. Leave the Run Check Based On Doctype Declaration in Page If Available check box selected.

   If your page doesn't have a doctype declaration, the checker uses the code version specified in the Check HTML/XHTML Compatibility With list box.

   We talk about doctype declarations in Chapter 14.

6. Click the Check button.

   Expression Web checks the selected documents' code against the rules for the code version you chose, and opens the Compatibility task pane (see Figure 12-2) below the editing window.

   
   Figure 12-2: Identifying problems in your pages' HTML and CSS code.

Each problem is identified by page name and line number, which refers to the page's HTML, and a summary of the problem. (You can see the HTML line numbers by looking inside the document's Code view, which we talk about in Chapter 14.)

To open the page and find the problem, double-click the problem. The page opens and Expression Web highlights the renegade code problem in your page's Code view. If you know how, you can fix the problem directly in Code view. If you're not comfortable with HTML, read Chapter 14. We talk about basic HTML concepts and working in the Expression Web Code view in that chapter.

Tip 

HTML 4 For Dummies, 5th Edition, by Ed Tittle and Mary Burmeister (Wiley), is a great HTML reference. If you're still stumped, visit the Microsoft Expression Web newsgroup. To find the Microsoft Expression Web public newsgroup, go to the main Microsoft Expression Web site at http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/expression-web/default.mspx. Then, in the Knowledge Center area, click the Join a Discussion link.

To save the results of the Compatibility Checker, in the Compatibility task pane, click the Generate HTML Report button. After the dialog box closes, a new page is visible in Expression Web. Save the report just as you save any other Web page. (We show you how in Chapter 2.)

After fixing the problems, run the Compatibility Checker again to see how your site checks out.