LogValidator and HTTP

[ I am changing the subject of this message, since we are derailing  
significantly from the original thread about response format in a  
number of tools, only remotely related to the LogValidator. ]

On Feb 2, 2007, at 04:10 , Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Now that you bring that up, I am a little curious why there's such  
> a strong dependency on any network communication for this product.  
> Almost all of this shoudl be able to run locally off a filesystem.

I suspect you do not understood what the tool [1] is, and does. Have  
you read the documentation? If the documentation is not clear, your  
thoughts on how to improve it would be welcome.

[1] the Log Validator - http://www.w3.org/QA/Tools/LogValidator/

The LogValidator's purpose is to process a number of resources on the  
Web. As input, it can take a list of URIs, or the logs for a Web  
server. Once the list is read or calculated (after parsing the logs),  
the log validator processes the resources through a certain number of  
modules, starting (if applicable) with the most popular resources.

A number of reasons why network, and indeed HTTP support, is needed,  
include:

* What the tool processes are Web resources, not files on a hard  
drive. For a number of quality checks (including markup validation)  
the way the resource is served by the HTTP server (content-type,  
encoding, language, http status code such as 4XX errors, 3XX  
redirections...) is as important as the "file" itself.

* The Log validator can process logs from any server, not necessarily  
the local machine.

* HTTP is used to pass the resources being checked through a number  
of online checking tools, such as the Markup Validator and CSS  
validator.

* HTTP support is obviously necessary for checks such as link checking.

etc.

I hope this makes things clearer for you.

Regards,
-- 
olivier

Received on Friday, 2 February 2007 00:47:31 UTC