March 6, 2004

1:33 PM

I know I should be validating all the stuff I put on the Intarweb on various different browsers, so I alternately run Mozilla 1.4, IE 6 and Opera 7 to review my work. I tried to download IE 5.X from a 'legacy browsers' site, but it wouldn't install with 6 already installed. How do I make that work? (And, as long as I'm letting my web dumbness hang out, where are the bestest places to validate your HTML and CSS, and what else should I be testing/validating that I haven't mentioned?)
posted by wendell to (6 comments total)

A CSS validator that warns about browser bugs would be very nice indeed.
posted by reynaert at 1:50 PM on March 6, 2004

I tried to download IE 5.X from a 'legacy browsers' site, but it wouldn't install with 6 already installed.

They used to think you couldn't do this, not without some sort of virtualization setup that lets you run multiple OSs on the same machine (Virtual PC, VMWare, Bochs). Now I understand that you can, but haven't tried this myself.

where are the bestest places to validate your HTML and CSS, and what else should I be testing/validating that I haven't mentioned?

The canonical place would be the w3c's validators: one for CSS, one for HTML.
posted by weston at 1:54 PM on March 6, 2004

Because I'm a pedant: validation is independent of the browser. Either your code is valid or it isn't (whether you choose to turn that into a value judgment is up to you). If, in addition, you'd like your code to produce the desired results in various browsers, that's a separate issue.

WDG also offers an (X)HTML validator and one for CSS. The only real difference between those and the W3C's is the interface.
posted by gleuschk at 2:33 PM on March 6, 2004

BrowserCam is brilliant - you submit a URL, and their array of machines take snapshots in different browsers which you can then review on their Web site. Currently they have Explorer 4.0, 5.0, 5.2 (Mac), 5.5, 6.0, Netscape 4.78, 6.2, 7.0, Mozilla, Opera, America Online 7.0, and Safari.
posted by nicwolff at 3:58 PM on March 6, 2004

That is brilliant, nicwolff.

FWIW, I'd also recommend checking that the site is basically usable in Lynx. Even if you can't make it look the way you want there, you can avoid the "[IMAGE] [IMAGE] [IMAGE] click HERE! [IMAGE] [IMAGE]" effect without much effort.
posted by hattifattener at 6:32 PM on March 6, 2004

"[IMAGE] [IMAGE] [IMAGE] thank you, nicwolff, weston and pedant too! [IMAGE] [IMAGE]" As for Lynx, I actually enjoy putting alt tags on Images, but I have to control myself from doing anything too non-sequitur.
posted by wendell at 6:46 PM on March 6, 2004