Re: [meeting] Notes from 2004-02-03

Notes from 2003-02-03 IRC meeting.

Attendees : Bjoern, Nick, Yves, Ville, Karl, olivier + lurkers
(Regrets: Terje)

Agenda:
- CSS schema and parser
- Checklink
- Test suite/harness for validator(s)

Action items after this meeting:
AI (cont): Bjoern -  write a specification for css schema
AI (cont): Bjoern - contact libcroco maintainers
AI (cont): Nick - investigate Apache2+modperl, play with :8001;
AI (cont): olivier - review and integrate submitted error messages
AI (new): Nick - demo test harness
AI (new): Ville - send edited changelog for checklink
AI (new): olivier - organize release cycle for checklink


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- CSS schema and parser

Bjoern showed and explained his draft[1] (ideas and issues) of CSS 
schema.
the basic idea is to have a language that helps writing tools for css 
and a new css validator.

[1] http://www.websitedev.de/css/schema/draft/

The group then discussed available CSS parsers to work from (or lack 
thereof). Ideal would be a C (CPP) engine, other languages Ok as well.

Existing products: SAC implementations are mostly vapourware, W3C CSS 
validator needs to be (partly) rewritten, libcroco the best-available 
approximation. Bjoern has a (continued) AI to contact libcroco 
developers and will proceed with that, and will work on his draft, show 
it to www-style at the end of february.


- Checklink

Currently Link Checker (checklink) tied to the Markup Validator (check) 
but the two have very different development process and speed. No 
specific reason for them to be tied (though nothing prevents against 
adding some integration glue somewhere if that is desired).

Decision: We will work on a beta test and standalone release, as well 
as packaging of checklink ASAP.
Ville will send a list/summary of changes from code in stable 
validator, olivier will prepare beta announcement from it.

Future work: tearing apart / modularizing. Easier now that it should 
not go in the way of markup validator's release pace.


- Test suite/harness

Currently we have a basic list[2] of links as "test suite" for markup 
validator. Not sufficient, nor very flexible.

[2]http://validator.w3.org/dev/tests/

What would be much better: (semi?) automated test system, a solid 
repository of test cases with description/expected result, and an easy 
(i.e not bugzilla-heavy) process to submit test cases (e.g with bug 
reports). Not only for markup validator, checklink.

Olivier has been playing with the current tests and Log validator[3], 
but that does not address all necessary features, e.g test the 
validators ui, escaping html, uris, showing proper dialogs, etc.

[3] http://www.w3.org/QA/2003/10/valtest/

Nick has ideas, will hack up a demo.
Olivier will gather clear and full feature set and requirements.

****************************************

Next meeting : March 2nd, 2004, 17:00 CET (18:00 EET, 11:00 
Boston/Montreal)

-- 
olivier