Re: Migrating the validator's experimental XML output to SOAP

Hello Struan, Thanks for your answers (and questions ;)

On 21 Nov 2005, at 07:01, Struan Donald wrote:
>> And now that the templates makes it much easier, and thanks to  
>> similar work for the CSS validator, the SOAP
>> interface is here.
>
> I assume that this doesn't apply to the information available in a
> HEAD request? It seems to still be in the current development
> instance.

If by that you mean the X-W3C-Validator-Errors and X-W3C-Validator- 
Status HTTP headers, yes, these will remain untouched.

>> Your thoughts on this plan would be much welcome. Also, if you  
>> know of
>> other people using the current XML output to access, or provide  
>> access
>> to, the Markup Validator, please make them aware of this e-mail.
>
> Documentation would certainly be handy ;) I think hanging onto the xml
> interface for a while would certainly be welcome partly as I know
> nothing about SOAP so it'll take a bit for me to actually write the
> code ;)
There is some (still rough and being worked on, so feedback from  
developers much welcome as always) documentation, available on the  
dev instance at:
http://qa-dev.w3.org/wmvs/HEAD/docs/api
You'll see that the way we use soap is really not very different from  
just spitting out a custom XML format, in most cases. It is, however,  
better defined, and problematic cases benefit from the existence of  
SOAP fault mechanisms.

You can see on CPAN the WebService::Validator::CSS::W3C module [1]  
which is used for the CSS validator's SOAP interface, which is very,  
very similar to the Markup Validator's. Updating  
WebService::Validator::HTML::W3C may be as simple as taking [1] as an  
example. As a matter of fact, since they are so close, and since  
W3C's other validators will also share a very similar web service, it  
might be wiser eventually to all use a common class (e.g  
WebService::Validator::W3C) and have only the specificities covered  
in the WebService::Validator::*::W3C modules.

[1] http://search.cpan.org/dist/WebService-Validator-CSS-W3C/

-- 
olivier