NetMechanic's HTML Toolbox looks under the hood of your Web site

By REBECCA ROHAN

July 24, 2000

NetMechanic Inc. doesn't tell you its HTML Toolbox service will save you money or that it will help you move up in the world. But when we turned the latest version of HTML Toolbox loose on three Web sites of varying size, purpose and complexity, the value of Toolbox 2.0 leapt out like a tiger in a birthday cake.

HTML Toolbox is a Web-based HTML-validation tool, link checker, download-timer, browser-compatibility charter, spell checker and automated repair service. The robotized mechanic is fast--you just plug a URL into the online form, select which tests to run, grab a cup of coffee and come back to an in-depth, hot-linked report, with different views for the different tests, in your e-mail box. You can instantly identify where things are right and wrong by glancing down a column using a star-rating system to show which pages need the most attention, what the problems are and the hot links to see for yourself.

The big addition to version 2.0 is HTML Check & Repair, which not only checks your code, but generates a corrected page that you can save and use either to replace your page or copy the areas where you find the changes useful.

Lions And Tigers And Bare HTML

We chose three sites that looked fine to us and gave their URLs to NetMechanic. The first was a slick, all-online shopping site, the second was the Web home of a software industry print newspaper and the third was my hybrid business/personal site. What showed up immediately in the first test page of the reports--the link-check page--was eye-opening:

• The beautifully designed, fast, technologically advanced shopping site had a spate of bad links from its press page. Customers may love doing business at the site, but a journalist trolling for news might just move on.

• A small string of broken links at an industry newspaper for software development managers was concentrated in a box of information about advertising in the paper. The site was serving up industry news, but wasn't responding properly to revenue-related page requests.

• As for my site, there was one broken link reported and, as with the other sites, a host of coding flags that we'll get to in a minute. What was most instructive was that the link checker reported a link as OK when that page was missing, and the browser instead pulled up NOTFOUND.HTML at my host's site.

  But NetMechanic's link robot does a splendid job most of the time--even the Jetsons' mechanical maid swept up the wrong thing sometimes--which brings us to the HTML Check & Repair robot. The code-checker gives the one-page overview with columns of stars showing the severity of problems. Each page represented has its own page with your code and commented corrections. Further down the page, you can press a button to "repair" the code; that is, to generate a new page with the recommended changes. You can then inspect both the old and new pages of code side by side in a split window, visit your original untouched page at your Web site or view the repaired page--a changed copy of the original residing at NetMechanic's site. When we pushed the button to save the file, we didn't get a dialog about where to save it, but saw the page appear afresh at the NetMechanic site and saved it from there with a normal File/Save.

  Should You Rent This Robot?

  HTML Toolbox will point out things you don't want to fix. It will break some layouts if "cheat" code is what makes those layouts work. It will tell you that lots of people can't see certain things you've done, even if you're pretty sure most can. But those limitations are the reasons HTML Toolbox can't make changes to your live Web site. You have to use discretion--but at least you can see what you might want to change.

  "The problem with validation is always--especially with all the GUI editors--that people don't follow the code," said NetMechanic COO Tom Dohm. "The reason we came out with Repair was because people were so intimidated by all the errors they decided not to do anything about it. We found there was a need for one quick solution that would fix them automatically. When you flag 50 errors, you're complicating their lives--when you're fixing the errors for them, you're simplifying their lives."

  In the meantime, NetMechanic is recognizing some of the illegal things done by some developers and GUIs such as FrontPage, and plans to point them out for manual fixes rather than splitting tables and so forth to make the code legal. Still, "You always want to take a look," Dohm said. Other HTML Toolbox limitations include the size of your Web pages--fewer than 2,000 lines and less than 125 kilobytes--and the Web site--400 pages. And there's no checking for good layout at different display resolutions, which everyone should take a moment to do.

  For all its shortcomings, the fact remains that HTML Toolbox immediately found problems that could cost sites press coverage and advertising revenue. We also like the fast, automatic and reliable performance and the combination of scheduled and on-demand testing. There are free online Web validators, but you get what you pay for--and often you get no results after a long wait. You can download HTML-Tidy from the W3C site (www.w3.org/People/ Raggett/tidy/), but you must remember to run it or schedule it some way. There are also link checkers built into software and sold stand-alone. The ones built into software don't always check both internal and external links, and the price of the stand-alones doesn't bring you all the other features of HTML Toolbox. Give the free trial form a shot, then make up your mind whether it's worth $35 a year to have some regularly scheduled, automatically generated alerts about things that just might be crucial to your business.

  Rebecca Rohan has been writing about hardware and software since 1988 and online technology since 1990. She is author of "Building Better Web Pages." You can visit her at www.bitcave.com.