[ANN] Release of the W3C Link Checker version 4.0

            -= W3C Link Checher version 4.0 released =-

We are glad to announce today the release of the new version of the W3C
Link Checker (aka checklink). 

In addition to its usual task of checking the status of links and
anchors in web documents, helping Web authors find broken link or solve
authentication issues, this new version now implements support for the
robots exclusion protocol. 

Several bugs were fixed in this release, including recursion,
redirection, negotiation and authentication bugs. A number of
accessibility, style, navigation and documentation improvements were
also made.


**  Use or Download the Link Checker  **

The Link checker is available as a free online service provided by W3C at:
        http://validator.w3.org/checklink

The Link Checker is also available for downloading on the Comprehensive
Perl Archive Network (CPAN) at:
        http://search.cpan.org/dist/W3C-LinkChecker/
and can be used either as an online service or a command-line tool.


**  Feedback  **

You can help us improve the Link Checker by sending us e-mails with your
thoughts or bug reports to the *public* W3C mailing list www-validator:
        http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/

Note that this list is used for feedback on several different tools, so
we suggest that you tag your messages regarding checklink in the subject
of your e-mail, e.g:
        Subject: [checklink] bug report - ....


**  Release notes  **

- Feature set modification
 + Implementation for support for robots exclusion standard
 + (Better) handling of non-HTTP error codes
 + Changed sleep time behaviour. Made sleep time between requests to
   each server configurable in command line. Default is 1 second.
 + New command line option (--exclude-docs)
        
- Bug fixes
 + Recursion logic bug fix
   (see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2004Jun/0181.html)
 + Negotiation bug fixes
 + Authentication bug fixes
 + tentative redirection bug fix

- Documentation, interface
 + Added/revised accesskeys
 + Markup improvements
 + Style now matching the Markup Validator's
 + Associated all labels explicitly with their controls as recommended by WCAG 1.0
 + Added instructions how to allow us in /robots.txt
 + Improved the "Trusted" domain documentation.
 + Added download instructions

- Others
    Checklink now requires libwww-perl >= 5.66


**  Development  **

The Link Checker is mostly developed by volunteers. Developers are
encouraged to get the latest development version of the code for 
Link Checker at any time from our CVS repository:
        http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/perl/modules/W3C/LinkChecker/

Patches, comments and insight on the code are absolutely welcome, also
on the *public* mailing list www-validator.


**  Credits and Thanks  *

We would like to thank the participants on the www-validator mailing
list for their input in shaping this new release. Thanks also to Hugo
Silveira da Cunha, James Gallagher, and Michael Ernst for their bug
reports and suggestions.

And finally, my sincere congratulations to the volunteer developers of
the W3C QA Tools Development team, especially Ville Skytta, for making
this new version possible.

Thank you.
-- 
olivier Thereaux - W3C / QA / Tools
http://www.w3.org/People/olivier

Received on Friday, 23 July 2004 00:32:01 UTC