Website displays fine, but 503 error on page validation

Question

I have a website running on Joomla that displays just fine, but when validated returns a 503 server error. Since there are so many php files in joomla, plugins, etc., and I don't know which one to fix, I was wondering if I could just do something in the .htaccess file forcing all 503 errors to report 200 instead. It probably isn't the best way to do it, but I just have no idea how to fix it otherwise. Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks

Answer 1

If you have your site in offline mode and log in at the frontend, the site will display as normal, however others trying to access the site ( in this case the w3 - validator?! ) will still get a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable -response. It is not not possible to validate the website while it is in offline mode (but it is easily forgotten that you logged into the page).

To validate the site during development you can set the site in online mode, and protect it with .htaccess-authentication ( http://www.htaccesstools.com/htaccess-authentication/ ), this will pop up a login-box in the w3 validator.