A couple of days ago, W3C has released a new version of a html markup validator (0.80). 8 months after the last release and a lot of work with 2 beta versions, W3C has presented a new “revamped” markup validator. They describe it as a “major milestone in the development of the validator”, that besides various functional improvements finally includes a major visual overhaul. Since the beginning, the W3C pages besides being accessible were having a really bad design, but the new markup validator is already a good change.
The usability of the validator has been greatly improved – one of the new “features” that i liked is the icon status which represents the status of the validated content – green when the markup is valid and red when it is not. This way it is easy to see which documents are valid, when you have a couple of them validating.
It is remarkable that the new markup validator works in resolutions until 640×480, in which it while having a small horizontal scrollbar, it is still represents everything on the screen.
The colors have been altered from straight #0f0 and #f00 to much smother #669900 and #1f2126 respectively, though i have to add that may be the color for the red is not a “web safe” one, and should be reconsidered for the newer version.
The functional changes, every regular user should notice in the next couple of days, while validating – for example for the XHTML 1.0 strict doctype the <html> tag started requiring “xmlns” attribute, and so on. This small things should affect the results of a lot of the already validated content, but it is for better – because it will help web designers to improve and to perfect their html and xhtml code.
Overall the changes are for better and W3C markup validator team have done a good job improving the most useful instrument from W3C.