An interface to Web testing services

Not sure if this is in scope for the QA group.  But anyway ...

In the W3C QA's QA Toolbox at <http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/> there is a
list of tools which can validate HTML, check links, etc.  The W3C HTML
validation and link checking tools are available with Web interfaces as
well as code for downloading.   

Sometime ago when copying a W3C URL with a comma punctuation at the end
I discovered that a number of checking tools on he W3C Web site can be
invoked by appending ,foo at the end of any resource on the W3 Web site
and a list of the tools can be obtained by appending ,tools 
i.e. http://www.w3.org/,tools

Initially I thought this was a piece of Jigsaw magic.  However recently
I realised that a one-line change to an Apache conf file could be used
to do this.  So we've implemented this for ourselves - 
see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/site/tools/ 

It occurs to me that this might be a useful technique to promote, as it
makes it much easier to carry out tasks such as HTML validation.  It's
also easy to maintain.

It further occurred to me that it might be useful to seek agreement on a
set of standard functions.  The ones that come to mind are ,validate
,cssvalidate ,checklink,  ,rchecklink (using the names which W3C
currently use) and maybe  ,accessibility.  

Comments welcome.

Thanks

Brian
---------------------------------------
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath 
BATH
BA2 7AY
Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Phone: 01225 38 3943

Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2002 10:24:33 UTC