Re: [check] Status and Progress

Hi,

On Thursday, Oct 17, 2002, at 04:38 Asia/Tokyo, Terje Bless wrote:
> A few quick words on current status and what happens in the near 
> future...
>
>
> As y'all may or may not be aware, I've been pretty much swamped lately 
> and
> as a result been AWOL from Validator stuff.

So was I, actually. I have a little more time to deal with validator 
work in the weeks to come, so if I'm needed I should be more responsive.

However, since I'm not (yet) involved in the coding, I shouldn't be a 
showstopper for, at least, proceeding to beta test status.

> AFAICT, Validator is in reasonably good shape. There may be some 
> charset
> issues remaining, but I got the feeling from Martin that the brunt of 
> it
> was sorted. That means I have only one issue outstanding before 
> calling a
> public beta, and that is updated MathML 2 DTDs (which ought to go in 
> today
> or tomorrow depending on how much grief they give me).

I don't have a very clear vision of all the issues (the ones I can 
think of are character entities, missing DTDs, logos?... and those may 
have been fixed already, I have some mail backlog to finish). As a 
sidenote, during the QA Team face-to-face I received the AI to work on 
completing and (semi)-automating the "test" suite for the validator. 
(will talk about this in another mail, later)



> Going forward I'm thinking we'll call a public beta ASAP.

Agreed.

> I'll advertize
> the hell out of it anywhere I can think of (mailinglists, newsgroups, 
> etc.)
> and hopefully we'll get all the "Dude, you *suck*!" messages _before_ 
> we
> update :80 with the new version this time. :-)

I wonder if it will benefit from an "official" voice (e.g calls for 
reviews sent with a W3 address) and if it needs any "coverage", i.e if 
we should ask the comm to talk about it. I'm tempted to think the 
answer to the former might be "yes", whereas comm coverage can wait for 
the "real update". I'm wishing to hear other opinions, though.

> Depending on how much and what kind of feedback we get I'm now aiming 
> to do
> the final release around the middle of November.

I like the date. We'll have a W3C members meeting around mid-nov, and 
there is at least one big web conf around these dates, a a new release 
would be a perfect time to try and push for more use of the validator.

> And speaking of the next version...
>
> In particular, I'm thinking of splitting "check" into (at least) two
> pieces; the CGI bit containing the logic, and a Perl module containing
> pretty much all the subroutines with a little OO interface sprinkled on
> them. And, for extra kicks, I want to strip out all embedded/hardcoded 
> HTML
> snippets from the code and replacing them with a templating system
> (probably i18n-ing the validator in the process).

I like the ideas. templating the messages is a good move, It may 
attract people wishing to improve the "user experience" with translated 
messages (in en_newbie or other languages). "modularizing" a bit seems 
like a reasonable move too.

I'm totally in favour to these ideas, provided that (as you mentioned) 
we branch the code in order to allow bug fixes of the prod version a 
little more often than real "releases".

-- 
Olivier

Received on Thursday, 17 October 2002 22:36:28 UTC