HOWTO help improve the W3C Markup Validator

Dear www-validator participants,

The Markup Validator, as well as the other open-source projects done at  
W3C, are mostly driven by the help and energy of the Web community.  
Many participants to this www-validator mailing list know this well,  
and indeed, any among you already help one way or another, and I want  
to thank you all for that. For those relatively new to this  
mailing-list, or those who would like to increase their participation  
but do not know how, here is a quick list of how you can participate in  
this project:

- Use the Validator
Using the service [1] regularly is a good way to find what you like and  
don't like, and to discover bugs. This mailing-list is the right place  
to send suggestions (after you've searched the archives [2] for  
previous threads on the topic), and bugs report can go directly to the  
Bug database [3] if you feel comfortable with it.

[1] http://validator.w3.org/
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/
[3] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/query.cgi?product=Validator

- Participate on the www-validator list
This list hosts discussions on the tools and services, and also  
receives questions and calls for help by users. Subscribing to the  
list, participating to the discussions and helpig new users is a great  
way for experienced users to help the project.

- Help make the validator more user-friendly
Two things can always be improved to make the validator less obscure  
and more usable: its documentation [4] and its output / error messages.  
Suggestions, rewordings and additions are most welcome, especially if  
they are based on the latest version of the files [5][6].

[4] http://validator.w3.org/docs/
[5] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/validator/htdocs/docs/
[6]  
http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/validator/share/templates/en_US/ 
error_messages.cfg

- Code, patch and hack
The code for the validator is maintained by a small team, mostly  
volunteers. Sending patches or providing help on the code is a very  
important way of speeding up development and improve the service. If  
you know a bit of perl (some understanding of HTML/XMK/SGML principles  
help, too), get the source from CVS [7] and start hacking... You can  
also install [8] a validator instance from this source, as it can be  
very helpful to test your patches.

[7] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/validator/#dirlist
[8] http://validator.w3.org/docs/install.html#install-fromsource

- Send people here
Next time someone tells you that "the validator sucks", agree with them  
wholeheartedly, suggest that they can help, and send them to the  
archive for this message :)

... and if the Markup Validator is not enough, remember that there are  
a lot of other open source projects [9] at W3C waiting for your help  
and input.

[9] http://www.w3.org/Status

Thank you,
-- 
olivier

Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 04:10:59 UTC