# Error Report

The Error Report is a feature which is meant for web developers who write web pages. The Error Report checks the HTML and CSS code of the displayed web pages and can list and locate errors in the code. With the help of the Error Report web developers can very easily locate errors in their code and correct them.

## The Smiley icon

I quick indicator of the quality of the web page code is the Smiley that can be included in the browser toolbar and/or the status bar. A smiling face means that no errors are found, a frowning face means that there are errors in the code. A neutral face indicates that there are no errors but nevertheless some details which might need some attention.

## The Error Report window

A click on the smiley icon or selecting the menu item Tools > Error Report will open the Error Report window where you'll get a detailed list of all errors and warnings iCab has found.

Double-Clicking an error message in the window opens the source code window and the error will be selected there automatically.

In the contextual menu of the Error Report window you'll find some additional features.

Note: Though most web pages do contain many errors and violations against the web standards and therefore iCab will display the "frowning face", iCab will nevertheless try to display the page "correctly". Unfortunately most browsers don't show that the HTML or CSS code has errors, so web developers won't be able to see that their code is invalid and so they don't know that they have done something wrong and won't fix these errors. As normal user you can just ignore the error report, you can't do anything to fix these errors. As a web developer you should have a look at the error report feature in iCab. iCab makes it easy to locate the errors, so you can fix them.

## Error Report Preferences

In the Preferences dialog you'll find a preferences panel for the Error Report feature.

Here you can enable or disable the error report feature. If the Error Report is switched off, the Smiley icon will be also disabled and hidden.

Its also possible to configure how many errors iCab will list at the same time. Some web pages do have many thousands of errors and usually it doesn't make much sense to display all these errors at once. Limiting the number of errors that will be displayed would only cost time and memory.

And it is possible to select the HTML or XHTML standard iCab should use to check the code. This setting is used if the code of the web page doesn't tell the browser which HTML/XHTML standard was used.

## W3C Validator

In iCab it is also possible to call the HTML and CSS validator of the W3C (World Wide Web Committee) to get an error list of the currently displayed web page. The W3C validator and the iCab error report are both doing a similar job, but both may give you slightly different results. To check for errors using the "W3C Validator", please open the web page you want to check in the browser window and control-click (right-click) in the page to open the contextual menu. In the menu select the menu item Page > Check Syntax with W3C Validator. ICab will then open a new window with some Tabs, and in these Tabs you'll find the results of the validation for each HTML and CSS file of the web page.

Please note that calling the W3C Validator requires that the web page you want to check must be accessible from within the internet. You can't check files that are stored on your private hard disk.