Back in June last year I posted a question about Validating HTML5 in the browser, looking for a tool similar to the HTML Validator Extension for Firefox that supports HTML5.

Unfortunately no such tools seem to exist, which makes quality assurance of HTML5 a lot more time consuming than I would like it to be. Not happy with that I decided to take a look into doing something about the situation myself, and I managed to come up with a solution that satisfies my personal HTML5 validation needs for now.

The solution involved two things:

  • Installing a local instance of Validator.nu (which validates many HTML variants, including HTML5) to avoid spamming the W3C or Validator.nu servers and to avoid sending potentially restricted or sensitive data to a third party server.
  • Creating a Firefox extension that uses the local Validator.nu to automatically validate all pages you load in the browser (including those that are password protected, on local domains, or behind a firewall) and display the result in the status bar.

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