[ANN] new CSS validator released

Dear all,

I am very happy to announce here that we have updated the production  
instance of the CSS validator.

There has been intense development since the last big release (more  
than a year ago!) and we have been looking forward to pushing all the  
changes onto the main CSS validator instance:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[ If it looks ugly, shift-reload.
   … Then if it still looks ugly, we're sorry you don't like the  
design ]


** Changes **

There are many new or improved things in this version, I will try to  
summarize a few here:

* Bug fixes. Lots of them. As far as I can tell over 50 bugs were  
closed in the period. Crash bugs, display bugs, parsing bugs,  
validation accuracy bugs... Squashed and forgotten.

* More flexible validation. When validating against a specific CSS  
profile (e.g CSS2.1) the validator will tell you if a property does't  
exist, but exist in another profile (e.g CSS3 or CSS2)

* Updated User Interface, similar to the W3C Markup Validator

All these changes are now live on the w3c free service, and we're  
preparing a jar for anyone willing to update a local install of the  
validator, which should soon be available at the usual location. Check  
the installation guide for details:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/DOWNLOAD.html


** Credits **

It is always difficult to thank all the people who deserve a nod, or a  
big hug. In the past year many people have helped the project with bug  
reports (Hello, Cecil), test cases, design (special thanks to Valerio  
Proietti), updating translations (the validator can remain available  
in many languages thanks to you!), and, of course, code.

For the latter, let me thank Maria Kaceriakova and Julien Grand- 
Mourcel for a very effective internship last summer; Yves Lafon and  
Jean-Guilhem Rouel from the W3C team for a lot of work put into the  
development.

Many thanks to everyone in the always-growing list of credits:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/thanks.html


** What Next? **

Big things coming up soon for the CSS validator. We're not stopping to  
rest after this release, on the contrary, our little team is busy  
working on drastically cleaning up some of the innards of the  
validator, and making changes to match the direction in which CSS  
standardization is heading. If you'd like to participate, and put your  
java skills to good use, remember the CSS validator is open source,  
and drop us a line.

We hope the next release will have plenty of new languages covered,  
too. If my memory is correct, there are translations for Swedish,  
Arabic, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese in the works. And if you want to  
participate too:
http://qa-dev.w3.org:8001/css-validator/translations.html



-- 
olivier Thereaux - W3C - http://www.w3.org/People/olivier/
W3C Open Source Software: http://www.w3.org/Status

Received on Wednesday, 12 March 2008 18:14:39 UTC