Early alpha announce: PubRules Checker NG

Hi,

you are all, of course, familiar with your dear old best frenemy the 
Pubrules Checker. For a variety of reasons, the W3C team have decided to 
give it an overhaul in order to make it easier to maintain and to 
provide it with newer features over time.

The new version is not yet production-ready, but it is starting to take 
shape and as such we would like to invite you to start using it. We 
would really like to make it as easy as possible for editors to get 
their documents published, and as such your feedback in the early stages 
of this new tool would be very useful.

If you feel daring, you can even try to use it as your primary pubrules 
checker, just be sure to tell the webmaster that you used the new 
checker when requesting publication.

You can find the new checker running here:

     http://pubrules.jit.su/

We naturally welcome not only feedback but also patches (well, pull 
requests) from the community. You can fork the code from here:

     https://github.com/w3c/specberus

The same repository contains the issues, feel free to report any you 
find there (be they functional or UI):

     https://github.com/w3c/specberus/issues

Please keep in mind that this is alpha software. Sometimes, it crashes. 
When that happens, the page won't disappear on you or show an error: you 
will just notice that the checking stops progressing (or doesn't even 
start). In such cases, please don't press the "Run" button twenty times 
in a row as that will just make things worse (if there are too many 
crashes in a short period of time, the service is just stopped until I 
manually restart it — obviously that won't be the case with the final 
deployment, this is just a temporary measure to avoid it spinning out of 
control while in development mode).

Also note that the last checks (internal link integrity, HTML 
validation, CSS validation) can take more time than the other checks, 
especially on large documents.

We plan to run this experiment for a month, starting now. Based on the 
number and severity of issues that surface we will formulate a timetable 
for the final transition from the current pubrules to the new one.

We hope you enjoy the tool and tell us everything that's wrong with it!

PS: For you ReSpec users out there, once this is deployed there will 
also be a way in ReSpec to run pubrules on your document directly, 
without having to generate and upload it. Stay tuned!

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Monday, 17 March 2014 16:35:48 UTC