Re: Producing an XML report from the validator

OK, we have some interesting applications - count me in ;-)
I'll see if I can tidy up my little prototype into something
fit for a public demo.


On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Christian Smith wrote:

> I'd like to be able to send data to the validator from an application
> (not a web browser) and get back a response in XML format which I can
> then parse and do something useful with.  In my specific case I would
> parse out the errors into an internal error list format and then
> generate an error browser.

OK, that's actually quite similar to my little private prototype.

>     With the current output of the validator this
> is not really possible (or at least not easily accomplished) but if the
> data were returned in a suitable XML format this would be almost trivial.

Yes.  Now the interesting bit is to define our suitable XML format.
My existing system is just based on parsing SP messages directly
into an XML <message ...> element, but hasn't been thought through
any better than that.

Esmond Walshe <esmond.walshe@eeng.dcu.ie> wrote:

>   What I want to be able to do, is
> create a validation report for an entire site.  This could be done, by
> either validating a batch of pages at the one time and producing an xml
> report, or by producing an xml report for each page and then developing an
> application to colaborate these pages into one report.

That spec is somewhat akin to what the Site Valet - and in particular
the Intranet Edition - offers, though it still uses a conventional
SQL database and HTML presentation.  That could be XML-ised very
quickly if it reaches the top of my TBD list.

> To create a report like this would be a lot more difficult if just using the
> current output from the validator.

But surely the limiting factor isn't so much the markup, as the system
load and report size?  The WDG validator offers a spidering option in an
online service, while the Site Valet offers an integrated set of reports
of a site with simple navigation between overview and detailed reports.
How would you be looking to improve on these systems?

-- 
Nick Kew

Site Valet - the essential service for anyone with a website.
<URL:http://valet.webthing.com/>

Received on Wednesday, 13 June 2001 12:26:26 UTC