Re: Some suggestions for the SOAP api

Bonjour Olivier, Hi Chris,

Let me add my 2 cts to the discussion I started.

Here's how I see this:

<m:explanation>
       <m:feedback>
        http://validator.w3.org/feedback.html?
         uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.yahoo.com%2F;errmsg_id=76#errormsg
      <m:feedback>

      <m:explanation-content mid="334">
       <![CDATA[
      <p>
      You have used the element named above in your document, but the
      document type you are using does not define an element of that name.
      This error is often caused by:
     </p>
     <ul>
      <li>incorrect use of the "Strict" document type with a document that
      uses frames (e.g. you must use the "Frameset" document type to get
      the "&lt;frameset&gt;" element),</li>
      <li>by using vendor proprietary extensions such as "&lt;spacer&gt;"
      or "&lt;marquee&gt;" (this is usually fixed by using CSS to achieve
      the desired effect instead).</li>
      <li>by using upper-case tags in XHTML (in XHTML attributes and elements
      must be all lower-case).</li>
     </ul>
      ]]>
     </m:explanation-content>
</m:explanation>

i.e. use two children <m:feedback> and <m:explanation-content>
Instead of the <p class="helpwanted"> and <div class="ve mid-344">

This, IMHO, is better for a SOAP consumer, since it avoids
all pre-formating. and it separates "semantically" two things:
the real explanation and the feedback link.

Sure, we can provide a sorte of a hack to check.cgi using
some regex to create this result but it will still be a hack
and wont be a really maintainable and nice solution.

I'd really give a hand but that's a long time ago that
I didn't made anything with perl and my skills go weaker
each day more :(

Olivier, so if I understand well, there's a bijective
relation between the message given in the m:explanation
and m:messageid?
And let me guess... is the feedback link always a function
of the uri?
So, can we just regenerate the m:explanation element using
a database of messages and a feedback link using the uri.
Am I right? wont this change in future releases of the validator?


Karim
--
http://akoncept.com
Innovate Humanum Est


On 10/9/07, olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Chris,
>
> On Oct 9, 2007, at 07:25 , Chris Parrish wrote:
> > This is tough - how do I use the style applied to: <div class="ve
> > mid-64"> unless I build my own local stylesheet (or inline, etc)?
>
> As documented, the <m:explanation> is the same block of HTML used in
> the validator's main output. Unfortunately, that's the way the error
> message explanations are stored, so unless someone comes in and
> wishes to clean that up, it may stay that way a while. Your
> suggestions are quite good, though, but it would take time to:
> * take the current error explanations file
> * massage that into something more structure
> * change the templates of the validator to take that structured data
> and make that HTML/API XML at runtime
>
> If anyone's interested, that would speed things up. If not, let's put
> the suggestion in bugzilla and see when one of the developers may
> have time for it.
>
> > Sure I can strip tags but then the whole "Suggest improvements on
> > this error message" bit gets reduced to a '?'
>
> Sounds odd. Are you sure you treat the incoming data as utf-8?
>
> > The point of SOAP is to get the data without the formatting --
> > otherwise, why not skip SOAP altogether and just have us parse the
> > HTML version to get all our info?
>
> Good point, but the soap output gives you much more info, and well
> organized. For instance, since you have <m:messageid> you could
> download the error message explanations from the code base of the
> validator and map that to whatever format you want to use. Would that
> help?
>
> --
> olivier
>
>

Received on Thursday, 11 October 2007 03:46:02 UTC