Greg Szorc shows how, in this entry on his blog, to use DTDs and catalogs to validate your XHTML pages with a little help from PHP.

This [validation from an external site like the W3C validator] approach is a good start, but it is far from ideal because it is based on an honor system of sorts. You often forget to validate each change you make and there is always some corner case that you forget. So, what can be done about it? Well, if you find yourself developing in PHP, you can employ the following solution.

The code he includes pulls in the XHTML content from your page (or the output of the framework's view layer) and pushes it into a DOMDocument that's build with the LIBXML_DTDLOAD and LIBXML_DTDATTR options.