[ANN] Beta test period for the W3C Link Checker (3.9.3-dev)

We are starting a beta test period for the latest version of the W3C 
Link Checker (aka checklink) today:
	http://validator.w3.org:8001/checklink

This new version brings in a few rather important changes (full list 
below), and we would really like to get feedback on it, notably on 
these two points:
  - Our implementation of the Robots exclusion standard. This was the 
feature most discussed after the last release, and we have implemented 
it as described at:
	http://validator.w3.org/docs/checklink.html#bot
- One UI question: Should the "Check linked documents recursively" 
checkbox be removed?
   Recursion is implicit if there's anything in the "depth" field, so 
the checkbox may be redundant, or confusing.


* CHANGES *

Here is a summarized list of changes since released version 3.9.2.
A full changelog is also attached with this message.

- Support for the robots exclusion standard has been added.
- Sleep 1 second between requests to servers.
- Cookie handling logic is now more robust and predictable.
- Harmonized layout with the Markup Validator.
- Do not send an Accept-Language header at all if the client did not
   send us one.  Previously, "Accept-Language: *" was sent by default.
- Miscellaneous markup, layout, and documentation improvements, minor
   bug fixes and warning cleanups.


* FEEDBACK *

We hope you will help us improve the link checker (a.k.a checklink) by 
sending thoughts and bug reports related to this beta test to the 
public mailing list www-validator:
	http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/

Since this list is used for feedback on several different tools, we 
suggest that you tag your messages regarding checklink in the subject 
of your e-mail, e.g:
	Subject: [checklink] bug report - ....

Developers are also invited to check the code :
	http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/perl/modules/W3C/LinkChecker/


Congratulations to Ville Skyttä for his lead work, and thanks a lot to 
all of you for the feedback since the latest release!

For the W3C QA tools development Team,
-- 
olivier Thereaux - W3C / QA / Dev
http://www.w3.org/People/olivier - http://www.w3.org/QA/