Re: My first EARL client..

"Sean B. Palmer":
> > Very useful, much easier to read, and understand.
>
> Great!
>
> > It also got me back interested in creating my EARL
> > client - so I did [...]
>
> Even greater! I found the scripts easy to find, download, and install,
> and it appears to have worked like a charm. Most links are underlined
> in dashed orange at the moment, except links to valet.webthing.org
> (the test site), and w3.org.

Yep, I would've put out a robot harvesting a few likely sites into the DB,
but as it's reliant on Nick's service, I didn't want to send a robot
against it without his agreement and also thought it might be worthwhile
waiting until the check is more exhaustive than just a validation which is
of little real world use to people browsing.  Thin dashed orange means not
checked, thick dashed orange means checked but inconclusive result, thick
dashed blue means pass, thick dashed red means fail, but that's just a
starter, there is probably a better UI.

> Your hash property raises an intersting situation: that people will
> and should be able to add properties that serve the same function as
> "date" and "version". We use date and/or version just to make sure
> that assertions about one page or thing on one day aren't confused
> with the same thing on another day, when it may have been fixed (or
> broken).

Indeed, but I don't find date and version sufficient for my needs, the
problem being with those sites who do server side negotiation of some
sort, it's no use me doing an EARL report only to find it's actually
totally different if I sent an SVG accept header (or even HTTP_USER_AGENT
<spit>.) or for sites who don't send last modified (despite the content
being identical each time.)  I'm imagining whenever content is found to be
different it's scheduled for a revisit by a robot to do new tests (or
automatically done by the client itself, depending on how the checks do
pan out.).

I have one question, that you're probably best served to answer - How do I
combine two EARL reports, say a validation pass, but then a human coming
in and saying, No, that's no good it fails WCAG 3.1 - how would I combine
those in a single EARL report? - at the moment I was just going to use my
moomin report as a catchall for a whole basket, but I might aswell do it
properly and actually collate the reports of different test tools into
one.

> Anyway, the demonstration is a very good one. Is there any possibility
> of releasing the ASP code and any other trinkets required?

Of course, it's stunningly simple ASP, and the mySQL database is a table
with url,EARL,result and hash fields- it needs a reworking really before
more intelligent queries can be made by the client, I'll package it all up
though (after correcting the other issues you noted) for download
tomorrow.

Jim.

Received on Tuesday, 13 November 2001 18:34:05 UTC