But did you know there is also a feature that allows you to discover and automate the validation of any W3C compliant data layer?
Introducing the QA2L tag!
To put your mind at ease - no, this is not yet another tag you need to implement and worry about -- it is simply a feature that comes out of the box with any QA2l account (even free trial accounts). When you load a page in Design mode, QA2L will discover all of the various tags that are on your page and towards the bottom of the alphabetically-sorted list of tagging vendors, you will notice the QA2L tag. Here is an example:
There are various easter eggs in the contents of the QA2L tag for a careful observer to discover, but let's take a look at the highlights:
1. The "html" component allows you to inspect and audit any HTML element on the page. This is where you can enable your checks for your data layer. Using RegEx, you can create a validation string against the html field to validate any JSON name-value pair. Optionally, you can create multiple checks against the HTML element to implement an easy-to-read set of auditing rules, as shown below. 
Once you create your checks, you can activate the task and it will run autonomously on a schedule. From that point on, the task will automatically alert you if it discovers checks that no longer match the logic you have specified, making sure that your data layer remains intact.
2. Have you ever wanted to check the values or presence of particular cookies?
With the QA2L tag, you can do just that - any third or first-party cookie will be available for inspection. Similarly to all other tags in QA2L, you can enable a variety of checks - from simple equality checks to validation based on wildcards, RegEx, or number of occurrences. 
3. Finally, how about being able to run your own custom JavaScript validation logic against any of the page elements or console output?
On that topic we have dedicated a separate blog entry.
Contact us if you are interested in learning more about QA2L.
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