Re: Best Practices in HTML Re: The use of W3C standards in Denmark Part II

Le 09 mars 2004, à 12:24, Tex Texin a écrit :
> The solution could be as simple as define a common program interface 
> that
> allows people to integrate checking tools and have one command that 
> verifies a

Agreed with an integrated tool but it takes a lot of efforts and a lot 
of resources and engineering to create. Do not forget that the 
validator is a volunteer effort. It is developed by valuable people who 
are not counting their time and make it true.

Without volunteers:

	Terje Bless, Björn Höhrmann, Nick Kew,  Ville Skyttä

and Olivier Thereaux (W3C), there would be no progress at all on the 
validator.
See the full list (http://validator.w3.org/about.html)

A common API would be valuable.

CSS Validator is a java program
MarkUp Validator is a perl program
Link checker is a perl program

You have other validators around too like the RDF, there's a new one 
developped outside of W3C which is an XForms Validator (still 
experimental).
	http://xformsinstitute.com/validator/

> page using an extensible list of tools, or perhaps verifies an entire 
> web site.
> Others could then write additional checkers that share the interface 
> (eg i18n,
> wai, or other checkers).

EARL as a reporting language can do that for the report and combine 
results.
As an input usually you have a file or an URI, there's nothing much you 
can do.

> It would also be easier to integrate checking with authoring tools. (A 
> menu
> item could launch a thorough check.)

Many tools already do that. They are sending files to the validators or 
they have syntax checking (like BBEdit), or they have local validation 
(like emacs)

> As for your question-
> a) list all requirements- my understanding is many of the needed 
> checks are on
> todo lists...
> I think if a start was made on the list of additional checks people 
> would like
> to have, plenty of input would be offered. ;-)

Until now you said: internal links, which can be easily checked 
automatically.

With regards to the desires of a HTML checker:

* How do you check that a "blockquote" is used for making a citation?
* What kind of ouput would you like to see of such a tool?
* How would you test the different requirement of that section?

	"""
	For example, to specify that the character
	encoding of the current document is "EUC-JP",
	a document should include the following META
	declaration:
<META http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=EUC-JP">
	The META declaration must only be used when
	the character encoding is organized such that
	ASCII-valued bytes stand for ASCII characters
	(at least until the META element is parsed).
	META declarations should appear as early as 	possible in the HEAD 
element.
	"""



-- 
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***