Looking for a couple of specific tools for QA testing HTML code reqs

[Notok]

Hi everyone!

I am currently working for an ad-agency doing web QA. One of the things that I have to do is to make sure that the HTML code meets specific requirements. I have a pretty good routine for most of it, but there are a couple of things that I would really like to be able to use some sort of tool to automate the process, and I am hoping that someone here might know of some tools

1. Finding empty tags - You would think that there would be tools all over the place for this, but I've had a hard time finding any except as part of larger commercial testing suites that I couldn't use; i.e., it wouldn't be worth buying an expensive suite of software for the single function.

Dreamweaver has an option to remove empty tags and I tried using that, saving a copy of the edited version, and using a diff tool to find what it did (my job is to report issues, not fix them), but it's far from perfect and the process was a little cumbersome.

I also use a code validator that utilizes the W3C validator and HTML Tidy, but it doesn't seem to work reliably for finding empty tags.

2. Finding ASCII characters in visible text - Note that it's not just extended ASCII, but anything that's not a letter, number, period ("full stop" for you non-Americans), or comma. Obviously I wouldn't want it to point out everything in the HTML code; just the text that's visible on the rendered page.

[mouser]

it would be nice to hear about other validator tools that people use -- it seems to me like it would be nice to have an all in one validator tool that supported finding empty tags, etc.  might be a good NANY 2011 project if a good free program for this doesn't exist yet.

[Notok]

That would be excellent A good (and thorough) validator would be welcome, for sure, as long as I can disable components I don't need; I let mine use HTML tidy, but much of what it reports could be considered "noise." It's easy to pick and choose when there's only a handful of "problems" reported, but if you include too many different validators then that noise can add up quickly (I've never seen a validator that didn't include at least some erroneous or superfluous reports, and it can be difficult to disable certain checks without disabling some of the useful checks as well).

For now, maybe someone knows of one that allows you to add custom searches? Maybe with a customizable INI file or something? The company wouldn't be adverse to paying for something, though I wouldn't want to use a big bulky suite that's primarily meant to do things that I don't need.

When I'm at work tomorrow I'll try to remember to post what validator I use, in case it can help someone else. It's a Firefox extension that does the validation locally (most of them send the code to online validator(s), which I'm not comfortable with for obvious reasons) and it does a great job for what it does; it just doesn't seem to do well with empty tags.

If someone does decide to make a custom validator, I would love to throw in a few ideas I would also be happy to pick the brains of some of the developers around the office, too (there are lots, including those with varying specialties, but there's a few very good/experienced people that come to mind).