Web design guru Jeffrey Zeldman celebrated his birthday today by releasing a plug-in for Dreamweaver that checks for and alerts users of web standards shortcomings in their design. Jeffrey Zeldman’s Web Standards Advisor costs $49.99 but Zeldman says even he found some embarrassing errors in his own blog’s code – something that can effect search engine visibility and thus the bottom line of any business on the web.
Though Dreamweaver catches a lot of flack from cynics, many people still use it and the design software is said to be much improved in recent years. Zeldman’s new tool is worth checking out.
In his blog post announcing the plug-in’s availability, Zeldman says that there are two parts to what he’s selling:
“1. The Web Validator validates your HTML and CSS and verifies the proper use of microformats, including hCard and hCalendar, for single pages or entire websites.
2. The Web Standards Advisor checks for subtleties of standards compliance in nine different areas–everything from structural use of headings to proper ID, class, and div element use. Nonstandard practices are flagged and reported in the Dreamweaver Results panel for quick code correction. A full report with more details and suggested fixes is also generated.”
You can read all about the software and wish Zeldman a happy birthday in his blog post from this morning.
Zeldman is the author of the internationally celebrated book Designing With Web Standards. We love standards based development and design here at ReadWriteWeb because increased machine readability creates a playing field more favorable for innovation.
