quiet text/GNU error output format for CSS validator

To make the CSS validator usable in command-line shell environments, it
needs an option for an error-output format that follows shell conventions.

Quiet
  If there are no errors or warnings, it should emit nothing and just exit
  0. (Instead of having "Congratulations! No Error Found.", etc., emitted.)

GNU format
  The error and warning messages should be in standard GNU format, with
  modification to allow for the sourcefile part to be a quoted URI. Example:

  "http://www.w3.org/2008/site/css/minimum.css":165: error: Unknown pseudo-element or pseudo-class :nth-child

  That format is recognized off-the-shelf by other tools like Emacs and Vim
  so among other things it would allow the error output to be consumed and
  used by text editors so users could get real-time validation within those
  programs, with the lines containing errors flagged.

  For reference:

  The page  http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/standards.html#Errors
  documents the base GNU error format.

  The page http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Validator.nu_GNU_Output documents
  the modified format where the sourcefile part is a URI.

I think the existing "text" option format could be replaced by this
quiet-with-gnu-error-format, rather than creating another "gnu" option
format. Because I doubt anybody is relying on the current "text" format and
parsing the output from it. I could be wrong, but if anybody were doing
that, I'd think they be glad to have this proposed quiet+gnu format, since
it will be must easier to parse and fits much better with the actual use
cases for plain-text output.

  --Mike

-- 
Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike/+

Received on Thursday, 15 March 2012 10:44:42 UTC