About W3C QA Tools
Indispensable for the professional Webmaster, Web Designer or Web Developer, these tools are all free and Open Source.
The W3C's main production are its specifications, but in the core of its philosophy is the belief that the natural complement to specifications is running code.
This page lists some of the tools provided by the W3C in the domain of Quality Assurance: validators and other test tools. Almost all of these tools are web-based, and are available as downloadable sources or as free services on the w3.org site.
More W3C Software
W3C develops many more software tools. See the W3C Open Source Software page for listings and news.
Nearby
An interesting companion to this toolbox is the Matrix of W3C specifications where test suites and validators for W3C specifications are listed.
The Basics - what you should run on all your web pages
- Unicorn - W3C's Unified Validator.
- The MarkUp Validator - Also known as the HTML validator, it helps check Web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML, SVG or MathML.
- The Link Checker - It checks anchors (hyperlinks) in a HTML/XHTML document or full Web sites and is useful to find broken links.
- The CSS Validator - It validates CSS stylesheets or documents that use CSS stylesheets.
The above three can be used all-in-one by running the Log Validator. Unlike the others, this tool helps improve the quality of a whole site, step by step, by finding the most popular documents that need to be fixed in priority. Learn more about this method in the Web Standards Switch document.
Developing mobile-friendly content? The mobileOK checker is a one-stop service to check your Web site and improve its mobile-friendliness.
Specific Tools - for Specific Needs
- Semantic Extractor - Sees a Web page from a semantic point of view. Extracts such information as outline, description, languages used, etc.
- RDF Validator - Checks and visualizes RDF documents.
- Feed Validator - Checks newsfeeds in formats like ATOM and RSS.
- P3P Validator - Checks whether a site is P3P enabled and controls protocol and syntax of Policy-Reference-File and Policy.
- XML Schema Validator - Validates XML Schema according to the W3C Recommendation.
- We also have developed several human-centered test tools: the Mobile Test Harness
(code) is
Web-based harness for browsers test suites, that offers users the possibility to record results on whether the browser they're using passes or not a set of test suites
; and MUTAT - an (older) human-centered testing framework developed in perl (code).
Open Source
All software developed at W3C is Open Source / Free software. This means that you can download and use them for free, if you like. It also means that you are welcome to participate in making them better, cooler, more useful for you and everyone.
- Check each project for instructions on how to download their source code, and install them on your system.
- All the QA tools are maintained by the volunteer developers of the QA-dev group. Why don't you join?