Validate DOM manipulation when using Selenium

Question

I'm using Selenium to test my application. A nice test would be that after every DOM manipulation I would validate the DOM. Is there a nice way to do this?

Obvious ways are:

• use some builtin Selenium function. Is there one?
• get the HTML of the DOM after the manipulation and use a local validator. However, I can't see how to get the HTML for the current DOM from Selenium.
• I could go through javascript somehow, either by adding a JS file while testing or through Selenium. But I'm not sure how to go about this. Thoughts?

Answer 1

There is no built in process for doing this using Selenium. There is however a Open Source project that is built on WebDriver, WebDriver is becoming Selenium 2, that allows you to do layout testing.

The project is at http://code.google.com/p/fighting-layout-bugs/ and was first shown at GTAC 2009 in Zurich. The code uses W3C and jQuery to check the validity of the DOM. Have a look at the video of the talk and the code that is there.

EDIT:

Thanks to sampablokuper the W3C validation is at code.google.com/p/w3c-markup-validation-filter/