Q:What are you doing with my email address?

A: We store your email address so we can contact you in case of problems concerning your job. From time to time we may also contact you with announcements about new NetMechanic features. Your address is kept strictly confidential and is not sold or distributed.

If you wish to be removed from our mailing list, you can do so at any time. Click here to remove your address or contact us at http://www.netmechanic.com/support/.

Q: Aren't Web robots controversial?

A: Robots are a fact of life on the Internet. If you've used Lycos, Alta Vista, InfoSeek or any other search engine, you've tapped into databases which were generated using robots. Robots are software tools. They are not inherently good or bad. However, poorly written robots can do serious damage to a Web site. Since a robot is an automated program, it can submit HTTP requests to a server at a very, very fast rate. This can overload the server to the point where it can't respond to requests from real human beings using real Web browsers.

The solution to this is for the robot to take its time processing your Web site. Our robots pause between each access to your site. That means it will take time to process your entire site, but the alternative could be serious for you and anyone else sharing your server.

Q: What exactly is a Web robot?

A: A Web robot is any automated program which requests HTML files from a server. A robot typically processes these files to find links to other Web pages, then processes these pages too.

Robots are not quite the same thing as intelligent agents. A true intelligent agent is more sophisticated than the average robot. In theory, an intelligent agent can provide the user with information he/she did not specifically request. In addition, intelligent agents are able to communicate with one another, and are sometimes capable of traveling between host computers. 

Q: Will your robot download a copy of itself to my machine?

A: No. Our robots run on our server only.

Q: Why does my job take so long? Is there any way I can speed it up?

A: We could process your job more quickly, but only at the risk of overloading your server. For reasons described above we pause between fetching each page from your site. The pause time is shorter when you submit a foreground job, but we encourage you to submit your job in the background all the same. If you can't wait an hour for your results, you must really be in a hurry.

A: Yes. The Robot Exclusion Standard is a mechanism to ensure that robots do not visit sites or portions of sites where they are not wanted. If you want to keep robots away, place a "robots.txt" file in your domain root. 

Q: How do I set up a robot exclusion file?

A: See the Standard for Robot Exclusion for details on how to create a "robots.txt" file. If you want to exclude all robots, set a User-agent line to "*"; if you want to exclude us specifically, set a User-agent line to "NetMechanic". 

Q: How large a site can you process?

A: We currently limit processing of a site to 20 HTML files or 800 links, whichever comes first. This limit may be changed up or down in the future, depending on the load on our server.

L i n k   C h e c k 

Q: The robot reported that my home page contains no links. What happened?

A: This is most likely due to network problems between your host and our host. Though this problem is rare, it does occur sometimes, usually for hosts outside the United States. If we fail to fetch your home page, we will try again up to a total of two retries. You will only get this message if all three tries failed. 

In some cases this message is may be due to a link which we do not currently process. For example, if all the links from your home page are part of a client-side image map, we will report no links for the page.

Q: My page looks fine in Netscape Navigator. Should I care about HTML validation?

A: The answer depends on what percentage of your audience you want to please. Validating your HTML increases the chance that your Web site will look good for 100% of your visitors.

The errors spotted by an HTML validator typically fall into two categories: bad tag usage and non-standard extensions. The first of these cases is straightforward. The HTML standards define the minimum level of performance for processing HTML tags. In practice, Netscape Navigator usually exceeds this level and overlooks minor mistakes. Other browsers may not be so kind. In any event, correcting these mistakes is simple and doesn't require much time. So why not fix them?

The second type of error -- non-standard extensions -- is harder to judge. In this type of error, your page uses a tag supported only by Netscape Navigator or Microsoft Internet Explorer. You will have to weigh the value these tags add to your Web page against the number of visitors using incompatible browsers. Professional design firms routinely track the type of browsers hitting their pages, and make just this sort of tradeoff decision. If 98% of your visitors can handle the tag and it adds real value to your page, you may want to keep it.

Q: How is your HTML validator different from others?

A: There are a number of other excellent HTML validation services available on the Net. These services vary in their level of strictness and in their output format. We've looked at all the services and tried to pick the best aspects of each one.

In addition, we check for a number of HTML tricks which go beyond the standards. We routinely monitor all the major Web design mailing lists for the latest tips and browser bug reports. We've tried to make our robot into an expert system which can tell you how to make your pages load faster, how to make them format the same way in different browsers, and much more.

L o a d   T i m e   C h e c k 

Q: Why does the number of server connections affect my page load time?

A: When your browser downloads a Web page, it must first open a network connection to the Web server. Once the connection is open, the browser can download multiple objects -- such as HTML files, image files, or audio files -- from a single connection. However, if your page includes objects that reside on several different Web servers, the browser must open a network connection to each of these servers. Each one of these connections takes about two seconds to establish and adds to your page load time. 

Q: My Web page is small and doesn't include many graphics, but you still didn't give me the highest possible load time rating. Why? 

A: We lower your page's load time rating by one level if it includes HTML problems, such as an image that doesn't have HEIGHT or WIDTH attributes. Correct these problems to get our highest rating. 

Q: Why do HTML problems affect my page's load time? 

A: Graphics are usually the largest objects in a Web page. As a result, they're often the last thing that is completely downloaded. If you use HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes with your IMG tags, the browser can allocate space for the image in the page layout. The browser can then draw the rest of the page while the image is loading. The overall result of this is a page that is displayed more quickly. This applies not only to IMG tags, but to TABLE tags. It is especially important to use the WIDTH attribute for nested tables. 

Q: Why do I sometimes get a size of "-1 " reported for some of my graphics?

A: We determine the size of your images from information provided in the HTTP response header. Though the vast majority of servers supply this information, some do not. As a result we cannot measure the size of these graphics. You may see this situation with graphics generated by a CGI script, such as those used by some banner advertising networks or hit counters. 

Q: Why do you report a frame for my page when I don't use frames?

A: Many advertising networks imbed their banner ads inside an IFRAME tag. This allows them to run "rich media" ads on your page. Since these really are frames, we report them as such. 

Q: I ran a "whole site" job, but you only reported the load time for some of my pages. Why?

A: We currently limit the number of pages and links that our service will test. If one of your pages contains objects that we did not test because of this limit, we will not report the load time for that page. 
 

S p e l l   C h e c k 

Q: What is Spell Check? 

A: Spell Check is an automated tool that will visit one or all of your web pages and check the text on the page for spelling errors. You may run this test in the foreground (i.e. while you wait), or in the background and have an email report sent to you automatically when the run finishes. 

Q:What is a Custom Dictionary? 

A: A Custom Dictionary is an unique feature of NetMechanic's Spell Check. The Custom Dictionary allows you to add to the list of known words in the dictionary. Proper names, technical terms, and foreign phrases may be added to the dictionary. 

Q: How do I create a Custom Dictionary? 

A: Simply create a file (perhaps called dictionary.txt) on your web server that will serve as the custom dictionary. For each word you want to add to your dictionary, place it on a line by itself in your dictionary file. Enter the URL of your dictionary on the submission page, and our robots will take care of the rest. 

B r o w s e r   C o m p a t i b l i t y 

Q: What is Browser Compatibility? 

A: Browser Compatibility is a tool that tells you which of your HTML tags are supported by each version of the major browsers. 

Q: How is this tool different from HTML Check? 

A: HTML Check tells you how well your code conforms to the HTML standards. Browser Compatibility tells you how much of your HTML code is supported by each version of the Netscape and Microsoft browsers. This difference is important, since even the latest versions of these browsers don't fully support the HTML 4 standard. In addition, if many visitors to your site use older browsers, these may not support many tags commonly used today. 

Q: How is my grade determined? 

A: We based your grade on the total number of compatibility problems we find on the page. However, in doing this we only count problems that affect at least 10% of your visitors. Using this approach means that we place a lesser weight on very old browsers that may have a lot of compatibility problems, but which are used by only a small percentage of your site's visitors. 

Q: Why are some of my problems highlighted in bold text? 

A: Any problem that affects 10% or more of your visitors will be listed in bold text. 

Q: What does the Browser Types Calculator do? 

A: For each problem we find we try to tell you how many of your site's visitors are affected by it. So if a tag isn't supported by Netscape Navigator Version 2 and Version 3, and those browsers make up 5% and 10% of your site's visitors, this means that 15% of your visitors are affected. The calculator uses data on the distribution of browsers visiting our site. If the distribution of browsers is different for your web site, you can enter your numbers here.