OBSOLETE: This document is now considered obsolete but is still available for reference.

About HomeSite v4.5's Validator

HomeSite v3.0 came with a version of CSE HTML Validator basically equivalent to v2.53. HomeSite v4.0 and above do not come with CSE HTML Validator at all. Instead, HomeSite v4.5 and above come with a validator that, in some cases, may appear to imitate CSE HTML Validator. The validator that comes with HomeSite v4.5 is certainly not CSE HTML Validator, so you'll probably want to upgrade HomeSite's validator to CSE HTML Validator, which works great with HomeSite v3.0 and above.

These results were obtained using CSE HTML Validator Professional v4.04 and HomeSite v4.5 - EVALUATION VERSION. For HomeSite v4.5's validator, all versions were set to active (including Internet Explorer and Netscape Extensions). The HTML document that was used is as follows (with added line numbers):

 1: <html>
 2: This text shouldn't be here.
 3: <head>
 4: This text shouldn't be here.
 5:    <title>Untitled</title>
 6: </head>
 7:
 8: <head></head>
 9:
10: <body>
11: <bgsound src="music.midi">
12: <blink>Blinking text!</blink>
13: <h1>Heading 1</h1>
14: <h3>Heading 3</h3>
15: <table>
16: This text shouldn't be here
17: <tr><td>Testing</td></tr>
18: </table>
19: <div align=left align=left>This paragraph is left justified.</div>
20: <form action="post.cgi" method=post>
21: <input type=text checked>
22: </form>
23: <img>
24: <a href="#top">To the top.</a>
25: <a href="sales@domain.com">Email us</a>
26: </body>
27: This text shouldn't be here.
28: </html>

As you can probably see, there are many syntax problems in the above HTML.

HomeSite 4's Validator

HomeSite 4's validator outputs the following after checking the above document:

The tag name: "BGSOUND" not found in the currently active versions
The tag name: "BLINK" not found in the currently active versions
The tag:"H1" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, FORM.
The tag:"H3" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: BLOCKQUOTE, BODY, FORM.
The tag:"TABLE" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: BLOCKQUOTE, CENTER, DIV, TD, TH.
The tag:"DIV" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: CENTER, DD, DIV, TD, TH.
If you make changes to attributes of FORM tag, please make them to CFFORM tag also.
The tag:"FORM" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: CENTER, DIV, TD, TH.
If you make changes to attributes of INPUT tag, please make them to CFINPUT tag also.
The tag:"IMG" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: A, ADDRESS, B, BODY, CITE, CODE, DD, DT, EM, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, I, KBD, LI, P, SAMP, STRONG, TT, VAR.
The tag:"A" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: ADDRESS, B, BODY, CITE, CODE, DD, DT, EM, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, I, KBD, LI, P, PRE, SAMP, STRONG, TT, VAR.
The tag:"A" is not allowed within: "BGSOUND" It is only allowed within: ADDRESS, B, BODY, CITE, CODE, DD, DT, EM, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6, I, KBD, LI, P, PRE, SAMP, STRONG, TT, VAR.

Issues With HomeSite 4.5's Validator

The first problem is that BGSOUND is not recognized. BGSOUND is an Internet Explorer tag and both Internet Explorer 3.0 Extensions and Internet Explorer 4.0 Extensions have been enabled in HomeSite 4.5's validator. It should understand this tag.
It appears that HomeSite's failure to recognize BGSOUND caused many more problems. So we'll remove the entire BGSOUND tag and try again. Of course, this shouldn't have to be done to validate a document, but having BGSOUND makes the rest of the validation completely useless.

HomeSite 4.5's validator outputs the following after removing the BGSOUND tag:

The tag name: "BLINK" not found in the currently active versions
If you make changes to attributes of FORM tag, please make them to CFFORM tag also.
If you make changes to attributes of INPUT tag, please make them to CFINPUT tag also.

Issues With HomeSite 4.5's Validator (try 2)

The validator is not recognizing the BLINK tag. BLINK is a Netscape tag and both Netscape Navigator 3.0 Extensions and Netscape Navigator 4.0 Extensions have been enabled in HomeSite 4's validator. It should understand this tag. This problem appears to be similar to the validator also not understanding the BGSOUND.
What are these messages about changes to the FORM and INPUT tag? Where did they come from? These messages where in CSE HTML Validator v2.5x's HTML Configuration File. They were disabled and to be used only as notes to the HTML Configuration File's author. Curiously, they ended up in Allaire's validator, and they don't make sense to display.
What about the real syntax problems in the file? HomeSite 4.5's validator doesn't say anything about them. Instead, all three validator messages are basically useless toward making any improvement in the document.
It is also interesting to note that the results of this validation are basically the same as the results of HomeSite 4.0's validator. HomeSite v4.5 validator stills suffers from the problems of not recognizing the BGSOUND tag as an Internet Explorer extension and the BLINK tag as a Netscape extension. Further, it still displays the useless messages about the FORM and INPUT tags. Why haven't these simple problems been fixed since HomeSite v4.0?

CSE HTML Validator Professional v4.04

CSE HTML Validator Professional outputs the following after checking the above document:

(line 2) Text was found in a "HTML" section. Because it is in this section, it must also be contained in one of the following elements: BODY HEAD NOFRAMES.
(line 4) Text was found in a "HEAD" section. Any text in this section must be contained in the TITLE element.
(line 8) There may only be one HEAD section in an HTML document. You've used HEAD 2 times.
(line 11) [6] Because BGSOUND is currently only supported by Internet Explorer, you may want to use something like <EMBED SRC="music.mid" HIDDEN=TRUE> instead of <BGSOUND SRC="music.mid">. EMBED will work with Internet Explorer 4.0+ and Netscape 3.0+.
(line 11) [1] BGSOUND is currently only supported by Internet Explorer. For instance, Netscape 4.0 does not support the BGSOUND element.
(line 12) [2] BLINK is currently only supported by Netscape. For instance, Internet Explorer 4.0 does not support the BLINK element.
(line 12) [7] Some consider using BLINK to be bad style and to be annoying.
(line 14) [7] You've used a heading without previously using the higher heading levels. Some HTML authors consider this bad style. For example, if you use H4, then H1, H2, and H3 should have already been used, in that order.
(line 16) Text was found in a "TABLE" section. Because it is in this section, it must also be contained in one of the following elements: TD TH CAPTION.
(line 19) The ALIGN attribute appears 2 times in the DIV tag.
(line 21) CHECKED should only be used with the INPUT element if TYPE=CHECKBOX or TYPE=RADIO.
(line 23) [13] HTML 4.0 requires that the ALT attribute be used with the IMG element. ALT lets authors specify alternate text to serve as content when the image cannot be displayed. Use ALT="" when alternate text is not appropriate, such as when images are intended to format a page.
(line 23) The IMG tag requires the SRC attribute.
(line 23) [7] For best results, you should use the ALT, HEIGHT, and WIDTH attributes with the IMG element. Using all of these attributes is considered to be good style. Use ALT="" when alternate text is not appropriate, such as when images are intended to format a page.
(line 25) [34] Did you forget to specify a protocol like http://?
(line 25) It appears that you may have forgotten to include or have misspelled a "mailto:" prefix before an email address in an HREF. Please ignore this message if your HREF value is correct and it is not an email address.
(line 26) Somewhere in your document you've linked to the nonexistent internal link "top" by using <A HREF="#top">...</A>. You should remove this link or make sure that it links to somewhere in your document by using <A NAME="top">...</A> or <ELEMENT ID="top"...>.
(line 27) Text was found in a "HTML" section. Because it is in this section, it must also be contained in one of the following elements: BODY HEAD NOFRAMES.
(comment) [24] A document type declaration should appear as the first line (line 1) of every HTML document. For example, for HTML 4.0 Strict documents, <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd"> should be the first line. For HTML 4.0 Transitional documents, the first line should be <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">. For HTML 4.0 Frameset documents, the first line should be <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Frameset//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/frameset.dtd">. Although HTML recommendations generally require this line, most browsers probably ignore it.
(comment) [8] <META NAME=DESCRIPTION CONTENT="(actual description)"> should be used in the HEAD section to provide a brief description of what is contained on this page. This information is used by many search engines when indexing a site.
(comment) [8] <META NAME=KEYWORDS CONTENT="(actual keyword list)"> should be used in the HEAD section to provide a list of keywords that are relevant to this page. This information is used by many search engines when indexing a site.
(comment) [15] An RSACi rating META tag was not found in the HEAD section of this document. Browsers that are enabled with this rating system may not display documents that have not been rated. If you have rated this document by rating the whole site or a section of it, it is still recommended that you include the rating META tag on all of your pages for performance reasons. For more information, please visit http://www.rsac.org/.
(comment) [26] Although not normally necessary, you may want to include a META tag similar to the following in the HEAD section of your document: <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
(comment) [14] 0.11s, 8 errors, 4 warnings, 6 messages, 7 validator comments, 28 lines, 18 tags (15 closed), 0 html comments, 0 entities, 41 programs run.

There is a tremendous difference in the quality of output between HomeSite 4.5's validator and CSE HTML Validator Professional! In fact, CSE HTML Validator Professional's output is so informative and comprehensive that it can be surprising given the small HTML document fed to it.

Notes With CSE HTML Validator Professional

CSE HTML Validator Professional properly notifies you of using text where it shouldn't be used, such as in lines 2, 4, 16, and 27. Allaire's validator doesn't.
CSE HTML Validator Professional detects that the HEAD tag has been used more than once. Allaire's validator doesn't.
CSE HTML Validator Professional properly recognizes the BGSOUND tag. It also lets you know that it is Internet Explorer specific. It even makes a recommendation to use EMBED instead of BGSOUND to work with more browsers. Allaire's validator doesn't.
CSE HTML Validator Professional properly recognizes the BLINK tag. It also lets you know that it is Netscape specific and that some people consider its use to be annoying. Allaire's validator doesn't. If you don't want these messages to be displayed because you already know this, then simply disable Flag 2 and Flag 7 in the Validator Options to disable these messages and they won't appear again if you don't want them to.
CSE HTML Validator Professional detects using headings out of order. Allaire's validator doesn't. Here, H2 was skipped. If you don't want these messages displayed, then simply disable Flag 7 in the Validator Options and it won't appear again.
CSE HTML Validator Professional warns you, in line 19, that the ALIGN attribute has been used twice. Allaire's validator misses this one, too.
CSE HTML Validator Professional knows that CHECKED is inappropriate for an INPUT tag of TYPE=TEXT, Allaire's validator doesn't.
CSE HTML Validator Professional generates a warning and error for not using ALT and SRC attributes with the IMG tag. It even tells you what the ALT tag is for. Allaire's validator sees no problem with not using these required attributes with the IMG tag.
CSE HTML Validator Professional detects a common problem of not using "mailto:" in front of an email address. You certainly want your visitors to be able to send you email!
CSE HTML Validator Professional tells you that an anchor for an internal link in your document is missing. Allaire's validator doesn't detect this.
CSE HTML Validator Professional displays two comments about using META tags in your documents, which can be very helpful if you want to make sure your site gets maximum exposure through search engines. If you don't want these messages, then simply disable Flag 8 in the Validator Options.
CSE HTML Validator Professional displays some statistics, indicating the validation time, number of errors, warnings, messages, validator comments, lines, tags, tags closed, HTML comments, entities, and tag name programs run. Allaire's validator doesn't.
All of the messages from CSE HTML Validator Professional are informative and/or helpful toward improving the document. Allaire's validator didn't generate any messages that we felt were useful toward improving this document (not a single one!). Remember that you can disable all of the comment messages if you find that you don't want or need all the information that CSE HTML Validator Professional is providing.

Conclusion

We believe that HomeSite is still one of the best HTML Editors available. However, when it comes to HomeSite 4.5's built-in validator, it falls far short. CSE HTML Validator Professional detects more errors, works more smoothly (example: not having to remove the BGSOUND tag for validation in the above example), offers more advice, and outputs easier to understand messages. You've got a great HTML editor already, so why not add the best HTML syntax checker? Chances are that you will use it several times on every HTML document that you create, making the benefit well worth the additional investment.

We welcome you to judge for yourself. Download an evaluation copy of CSE HTML Validator Professional and use it up to 50 times. Then register and save 40% off the business use price for being a licensed owner of HomeSite!

Try it Yourself

Don't believe us? Just copy and paste the source from the following link into HomeSite and use the validator (remember that the results were obtained using CSE HTML Validator Professional 4.04 and HomeSite v4.5 - EVALUATION VERSION; using other versions may produce different results). You can view the test document. Remember to view the source code to see the actual document.

In order to use CSE HTML Validator Professional instead of HomeSite's internal validator in HomeSite v4.5, simply go to Options|Settings and then to the Validation settings and check the "Use CSE HTML Validator..." checkbox. You must have CSE HTML Validator Professional installed (registered or evaluation Professional version; not the Lite version) in order for this to work. Then press SHIFT+F6 to validate the document. You can press SHIFT+F6 to validate the document using HomeSite 4.5's internal validator when the "Use CSE HTML Validator..." checkbox is not checked.