Re: suggestions from a developers point of view

On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Adam van den Hoven wrote:

> At my company, I am responsible for telling our developers what HTML to
> generate. Our developers are Java guys who don't know a whole lot about
> markup. Ensuring that they are producing valid HTML code is a real
> problem since their computers are not accessible from the outside world.
> Getting them to regularly save the output HTML and submit it to the
> service is never going to happen. 

Then installing a validator locally would make sense for you.
You can download W3C validator source, and good alternatives are
available from www.htmlhelp.org or arealvalidator.com .

Alternatively, your problem looks well-suited to a validation webservice.
I have such a service for XML (and XHTML) at valet.webthing.com , and
I'll be happy to supply you with either a service or the software to
meet your needs.

> What I would like to be able to do is submit, not a URL or a file, but a
> string. This would make it easy (if not particularly safe for a
> production environment) to create an HTTP request from within my JSP
> code that would retrieve the validation report (even better is to make
> the java.io.PrintWriter.flush() method do the validation and append it
> to the output). This way the developers will have no problem producing
> valid HTML. 

This approach has some attractions, but is also quite challenging
to implement.  The WDG validator ( htmlhelp.org ) has a direct entry
box, but that works by inserting your extract in an HTML context.

For XML (and hence XHTML) the problem is much easier.  You might
want to check out how close the existing Valet service is to
meeting your needs, and get in touch if necessary.

> Also, it would be nice to retrieve the report as xml.

Site Valet has offered that for over a year now.

-- 
Nick Kew

Received on Thursday, 15 August 2002 15:41:55 UTC