Validation of input . . .

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Validation of input . . .

Jasonn

12:58 pm on May 14, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hi all,

I’m running my own ASP based e-commerce solution at present however my client keeps making mistakes when attempting to use html in the product descriptions. I’m having a nightmare getting their site indexed on Google and the only reason I can see is the invalid html code they keep entering (Googelbot has visited but didn’t actually index anything)..

I was wondering is there anyway to validate any html input before it’s stored in the database to avoid this happening in future?

Iguana

10:12 am on May 15, 2003 (gmt 0)

Both Google and Internet Explorer are incredibly forgiving when it comes to HTML - so they tend to accept any old rubbish. You can put extra <TITLE> tags in, miss out <BODY>, just about anything

Your Google indexing problem is almost certainly relatwed to something else -
Have you got a link to the site that Google can follow?
Have you waited long enough (1 month for crawl + 1 month to publish SERPS)
Google doesn't hang around very long waiting for dynamic pages to render - was it slow when crawled?

Xoc

5:55 am on May 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

To validate the input, make them code to the XHTML spec. Then create a DTD for the HTML that you want to allow. Then load their HTML into an XML parser and validate it agaist the DTD. If it doesn't validate, kick out an error message.

davegerard

1:15 am on May 23, 2003 (gmt 0)

I had put together an HTML content manager for my clients that creates the HTML on the fly and populates a textarea with the results. It's pretty thorough and once submitted updates the database.

It's been a while since I looked at it, but let me know if you think that you could use something like that for those end users.

Dave