Creating web pages is a very easy task. However it is extremely easy to make errors.
Errors in HTML files not only make your page very hard to read (often HTML tags are displayed along with the main text of the page), but they can also cause formatting errors, such as tables not being drawn, or text being aligned incorrectly.
For example, what is wrong with the following HTML?
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> My Home Page </TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY
The content of this page goes here!
</BODY>
</HTML>
The error may not look like much (once you actually find it), but failing to close the '>' of the <BODY> tag causes the entire page's content to not be shown in the above example.
Another common error is made with links. What many people fail to realise is that on UNIX servers (which is what most www servers are) pathnames are case sensitive. Therefore, <a href="Link.html"> is not the same as <a href="link.html">. And because this link works perfectly on the Macintosh platform, many people do not realise they are doing anything wrong.
Wouldn't it be nice if there was a program that could detect any problems in your page, and check links, attributes and attribute data? Well, now there is!
Introducing the HTML syntax checker for Macintosh:
LakeSoft PageInspector
Known bugs in PageInspector 0.82
As this is the initial release of PageInspector, it is not perfect. Most of the bugs listed here should be fixed by version 1.0.
Limitations of PageInspector 0.82
*One of the main limitations of this release of PageInspector is the limited number of errors that can be fixed by clicking the "Fix" button in the "Errors" window. Version 1.0 should be able to correct many more errors, including broken links.
*When PageInspector comes across a link with a target, eg. <a href="File.html#middlebit"> it will check to see if "File.html" exists, but it will not check to see that it contains the target "middlebit".
*If, after checking a file, you go into the Finder and move either the open file in PageInspector or files that the open file depends on, PageInspector will not recheck the links. To do this, the file must be re-opened in PageInspector.
*PageInspector does not allow nesting of tables and lists, and it doesn't understand frames. This will change by version 1.0
*One common error in HTML that PageInspector doesn't check is the overlapping of tags. For example <b>Bold<i>Bold Italic</b>Italic</i> is syntactically incorrect. If you open the <i> tag within a <b> tag, you MUST have </i>, and only then have </b>.
NOTE: You may get the error "00004F" This is an unrecognised colour name. This is caused by such things as "<font color="00004F">". This is not a bug in PageInspector - if a colour does not have '#' before it, PageInspector assumes that it is a defined colour name (eg. <font color="red">) Because PageInspector can't find a colour name that matches "00004F", it brings up an error. To correct the error in your HTML file, you need to add '#' before the hex colour code, eg. "<font color="#00004F">". PageInspector will now treat the colour as a hex colour code instead of a colour name.
