Re: Shaming compaines into improving their HTML

I'm sorry I haven't replied sooner, but I've been on the road for several
weeks now and I'm just starting to catch up.


On 09.08.01 at 16:28, Dr Richard A. O'Keefe <ok@cs.otago.ac.nz> wrote:

>This University is preparing a new "Web Policy and Guidelines" document.
>The current guidelines mentioned the W3C's validator. Rather than ship
>thousands of pages to the W3C, most of which would fail and have to be
>resubmitted several times, I thought it would be good if we could run a
>local copy.
>
>Admittedly I am a bear of very little brain, but I haven't had much luck
>finding out whether it is possible to do this.  (I know how to put nsgmls
>and a DTD together, but the W3C's validator does rather more than that
>these days.)


For starters, you can have a look at <URL:http://validator.w3.org/source/>.
You need to get the "validator" module from W3C CVS, install it so your web
server can find it (i.e. set document root and script alias to the correct
locations under the "validator/" three (any UNIX geek should be able to do
this)). You'll need several Perl modules (can be grabbed from CPAN (any
Perl geek should be able to do this)) and you'll probably need to modify
some paths in the "check" CGI script.

You'll also need a compatible variant of ngmls; we're using a patched
version from Liam Quinn
<URL:http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/source.html>, but you should
be able to get either vanilla SP <URL:http://www.jclark.com/sp/> or OpenSP
<URL:http://openjade.sf.net/> to work.

This is _not_ an easy task, but if you can draw on various types of
computer geeks at the University it should be within reach. We do intend to
remedy this situation eventually, but...


In the mean time, you may wish to consider getting the WDG Validator
instead; it's distributed as Red Hat and Debian packages
<URL:http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/packages/> in addition to the
source release (I even think it's apt-get'able on Debian!).

You might even consider using Nick Kew's most excellent on-line Site Valet
service <URL:http://valet.webthing.com/>; it's commercial but emminently
affordable (IIRC). It's also as, if not more, accurate as the W3C and WDG
Validators and has more features.

If your Web Humans need a local tool, Liam Quinn has released a shareware
HTML Validator for Windows -- A Real Validator
<URL:http://aRealValidator.com/> -- based on his modified SGML Parser. (I
assume the UNIX geeks can use nsgmls).

Received on Wednesday, 22 August 2001 13:50:03 UTC