• Reported by Nate

Develop websites? Have an interest in keeping them valid? Use an RSS aggregator? If you meet these three criteria, you'll probably want to check out Ben Hammersley's XHTML Validator to RSS.

The w3c's XHTML validation service is tremendously useful, but it's a pain to be continually checking it for breakages, and then working through the errors when they occur. Their user interface leaves a bit to be desired as well.

Personally, I like nice to-do lists and automatic checking of my pages. So to combine the two, I've made a widget to create a XHTML Validation Results RSS feed from any page.

To use it, just append your URL to http://www.benhammersley.com/tools/validate.cgi?url= and subscribe to that in your nearest RSS reader.

You can also grab the Perl source code from his site. This really seems like one of those things that changes the landscape of our profession. What is the biggest hinderance towards more sites on the web validating? After ignorance, I'd say the number 2 reason is "ease of validation". This tool makes the number 2 reason quite a bit less of an issue.