Tidybot

W3C and WDG both offer validators for download. Every now and then I go and look at the instructions, and shudder with horror. Installation of these things is not easy, and I still don’t think I have the necessary knowledge to be able to do so successfully. Although not usable for many pages Tidy, an html parser, has been around for some time. Recently a friend of mine decided he wanted to be able to create something that would parse a site we maintain, The L-Space Web. So he went off and wrote one.

Tidybot can parse local html files and by utilising Tidy can check these for errors. Although Tidy can never replace the online validators, it does do a good job of finding small errors, some of which are easy to over look. With Tidybot you can now traverse these sites, currently only locally, and get a nice html report.

All the necessary files for installing it are included, and it works out of the box. In testing, on a high end PC, it managed to produce a report on 3000 plus pages in 7 seconds. Unfortunately my PC is a little slower, and it took over a minute. But my PC is getting on a bit these days.

The program is free, and the maintainer welcomes all feedback about it. You can download Tidybot from the Tidybot web page.

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