I am visiting the web pages worlds these days - I confess it is not my metier, but this html trip is unveiling nice tools to minimize your the stress about validation and performance of web pages.

One of the hard tasks related to web performance is the large amount of details that can affect the usability round trip (request-server processing-response-browser rendering). During my preliminary tests, I asked my JUG communities about that, and they friendly suggested me a lot of server profilers, document validators, css and js inspectors, FireBug, YSlow, Tidy, Webalyzer, etc. The pandora box was opened and my screen seems a Christmas tree, full of lights and blinking alerts and reports :)

I just started thinking about a better way to run all the tests at once, and to take a coffee while the inspection bundle happens somewhere. Well, since I am in Christmas, my wishes seem to be considered - I found an under development W3C tool to test web pages in deep - it is called Unicorn.

The W3C Unicorn Project

From Unicorn Project Documentation:

• All these services are individually useful, but it is often cumbersome for developers of Web content to use them all sequentially and test as many aspects of Web quality as possible. The Unicorn Project aims to provide the big picture about the quality of a Web page, by gathering the results of all these tools into a single page.

I tried the tool and it seems the public preview has some problems, but since the code is available to download, I guess it is very promising - you can download and install in your web server, the Unicorn is a web application coded in Java. Meanwhile, I will continue navigating on the web design's world, trying to collect a bunch of good supporting tools and to generate a checklist about web projects quality. And, of course, I will keep on posting here the novelties about this hard task about web projects optimization.