Easy Online Ways to Clean Up Your Tags & Styles

Even if you’re very seasoned in in building and maintaing web sites–and especially if you’re not–it can be handy to have references right on your computer for everything from HTML tags to CSS styles. After all, staying up with what is current constitutes following a moving target. Likewise, even if you’re uber-talented at web site building and maintenance, easy sources for validating your code are helpful. In this post, I’ll show how easy it is to access all the free references and validation you need at W3Schools–a site for web developers.

At W3Schools’ home page, on the right rail, you’ll find a long section of links called References. Further down the right rail, you’ll find a section of links called Validation.


W3Schools’ References links supply the latest and greatest tags, styles and other available tools for everything from HTML 4.01 to CSS 2.0. For example, here is a snippet from the HTML 4.01 reference list:

Likewise, here is a snippet from the long list of CSS 2.0 styles:

At W3Schools’ site, you can find similar reference lists for XHTML 1.0, PHP 5.1, JavaScript, and more. I keep these pages bookmarked and refer to them frequently when updating web pages.

I’m always surprised by how few web designers and site operators go through the process of validating their code before they bring it live. It’s super simple to validate code on a page, and it can help prevent everything from broken links to formatting problems. Down the right rail of the W3Schools home page, the Validate list of links allows you to plug in the URL for any page you build, and validate that your code and links are good. You get specific feedback if any of your code is invalid.

Do you know of any good online references and validation tools that site operators should use?

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