- From: olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:01:40 +0900
- To: WWW-Validator Community <www-validator@w3.org>, CSS validator list <www-validator-css@w3.org>, QA IG <www-qa@w3.org>, public-evangelist@w3.org
Dear all, First, please accept my apologies for the cross-posting. I suppose this is a logical curse for a message about a harmonizing too, that it touches topics covered by a number of communities, and it takes a certain amount of cross-posting. If you reply, please use some restraint in cross-posting: replies aimed at the developers should be sent to <public-qa-dev@w3.org>. Thank you. One of the problems common to all quality checking effort is that is is usually impossible for one tool to do it all, for a number of reasons. The best reason, probably, is that a do-it-all-and-coffee tool will seldom be as efficient, well designed and maintained as a very precise tool designed for a single goal. Yet, in terms of usability, needing to check a Web document through 3 tools for the sole task of checking the markup, style and the presence broken links is hardly a pleasure. With that in mind, there has been an effort in the qa-dev team to come up with a solution: first with some formalized ideas (by Terje Bless and Bjoern Hoerhmann) in the context of markup validator modularization, and now within a software projects led by Damien Leroy and Jean-Guilhem Rouel, code named "Unicorn". The goal of Unicorn is to create a framework capable of organizing the work on multiple observers on a single document, orchestrate their work in pre-defined tasks, gather their observations (be that validation errors, broken links, spelling mistakes, etc) and present them in a useful manner to the end user. The strategy used, since all the tools we commonly use are written in different languages, barring us from using a code-level library approach, is to organize the framework with web services. A short writeup about the framework is at: http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/07/meet_the_unicorn.html and the more detailed documentation for the project is at: http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/obs_framework/ with technical specifications for the "contract", "task", "observers' output", etc. Worth noting is that the tool is already functional (at an alpha test level) and that we should have a public demo running rather soon. The source code will be public and open, as always with our tools. Feedback (if possible sent only to the developers' list public-qa- dev@w3.org) is very welcome, either on the principle, the technologies used, the schemas developed, etc. Also, if you are the developer of a checking tool which you think would be a good observer for that framework, and if you haven't heard from me on that topic: 1- check your spam mailbox :) 2- drop us a line on public-qa-dev, we'd be happy to talk with you Finally, feel free to spread the word about this development project to selected forums or lists if you think they could be interested. Thank you, olivier -- olivier Thereaux - W3C - http://www.w3.org/People/olivier/ W3C Open Source Software: http://www.w3.org/Status
Received on Wednesday, 26 July 2006 06:01:15 UTC