Re: Fwd: Re: Validator Test

Greg Sabin wrote:

>----------------------------------------------------------------
> Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell?
> Check out new cars at Yahoo! Autos.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------

Pardon?

> I just created a page and put in no content , please test this
> page and tell me where microsoft went wrong, please

> http://alien-computer.org/W3testpage.aspx

Hi, I've not the faintest idea what your MS or other tools are
doing, but it certainly breaks near the first inline script.

Inline scripts and inline styles are always a bad idea, e.g.
why should I or a Lynx user be forced to download this crap
if we don't or can't use it.

And inline scripts and inline styles are somewhat tricky if
you use XHTML, you need some magic that preserves the content
for XML processors while still hiding it from old browsers.

But while it's interesting to see what you get for an "empty"
document with your tool - the validator sees about 840 lines
with about 40 errors - this wasn't what I meant when I wrote
"use a dummy document".

Google's Webmaster tools want to see some evidence that the
site you claim to manage is really your site.  They offer two
ways for you:

1 - You can add a meta tag with the code in the head.  You've
    already tested that, and your strange tools never let you
    add anything to their real head.  And if you try to create
    your own head you'd end up with even more invalid (X)HTML,
    besides Google won't accept this gibberish as evidence.

2 - But you can use plan B, create a file with a name chosen
    by Google (= the code), upload it or install it or what
    else your tools force you to do, and Google will find it
    by its name, and never look into it.  It can be empty, or
    840 lines of junk claiming to be "empty".

Maybe plan B works for you.  However it's possible that Google
insists on a file in the style codecodecode.html, and not any
codecodecode.aspx  If that's the case you lose, either find a
better hoster / tool, or give up on the Webmaster tools, they
are not THAT interesting.  It's certainly nice to get a list
of broken links, a list of inbound links, and a list of the
search terms resulting in click throughs to your pages, but
that's all about it, nice to have, not essential:

There are other tools to find the broken links, there are other
tools to validate a sitemap.xml if you follow the instructions,
and there are other tools to validate a robots.txt.

Some days ago I tested the latter, and Google's Webmaster tools
told me that my fresh Sitemap: entry in robots.txt as specified
in the <http://sitemaps.org/protocol.php> is wrong... <shrug />

Frank

Received on Wednesday, 25 April 2007 16:24:19 UTC