Updating the Firefox Web Developer Toolbar To Use Your Own W3C Validator

This is a follow-up of sorts to my post on Installing the W3C Validator on Ubuntu 8.04.  One of the tools I use for web development is the Web Developer toolbar for Firefox written by Chris Pederick.  This toolbar gives you dozens of shortcuts to options that are invaluable to creating quality web sites and I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Please visit its web page on Chris’ site for more information about what you can do with this tool.

One fantastic feature is that it provides shortcuts to various web site validators such as the W3C markup validator, CSS validator, and more.  Since the W3C offers their markup validator as open source I prefer to run my own copy locally to reduce wait times and bandwidth.  This leaves me with a slight problem becuase the shortcuts in the web developer toolbar don’t know about my local validator, they only know about the public ones on W3C’s site.

So let’s change that.  All you have to do is open the “Tools” menu on the Web Developer toolbar and select the “Edit Tools” option.  This will open a window that lists all of the validator options listed in the Tools menu and the application or URL to call when that option is selected.  Well designed, Chris.

So all we need to do is select the “Validate HTML” entry from the list and click “Edit…”.  Now, replace the “validator.w3c.org” section of the url with the address of your copy of the validator (“localhost/w3c-markup-validator” if you followed my guide) and viola, you’re set.  Now when you click “Tools” -> “Validate HTML” from the Web Developer toolbar you’ll be submitting to your own validator.

Of course this will also work if you prefer to use a validator other than the W3C, such as Validome or the Web Design Group (WDG), both fine validators as well.  Speaking of, you might notice there is an “Add…” button down at the bottom of the options window.  I used that to create shortcuts for validating to my local W3C validator, the W3C’s own validator on their site, and the WDG validator on htmlhelp.com, giving myself just that many more options.