Re: Some suggestions for the SOAP api

On 9/27/07, Gmail Directeur <directeur@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi W3C folks,
>
> I'd like to thank you for the W3 markup validator API,
> and wanted to give you some of my humble suggestions.
>
> 1) It would be nice, IMHO, to include in the headers some
> information about caching, like "Last-Modified" and "ETag"
> headers, in order to reduce the charge on the W3C validator
> servers. We won't ask the server to send the xml answer
> if it says that it wasn't changed sine a given date.
> That would be doable, I think, by looking at the headers
> of page being validated.

I think this is a good idea for a validation system - but may not be
do-able for the public W3 validator. To cache the results would
require an enormous amount of resources given the volume of the
requests the validator gets. Additionally, the validator is intended
to test the HTML served by the server not necessarily the
last-modified headers.

The type of system you're referring to is something I think can be
handled at an individual level by utilizing a local copy of the
validator and a database which caches the results. This is what we've
done for our university's web developers with great results.

>
> 2) In the SOAP answer, it would be better, IMHO, to have
> an XML content of the "m:explanation" tag. Not plain HTML
> so the api consumer could use these data as it would.

This is possible, but given the number of error messages the validator
is capable of displaying it would take a lot of work to duplicate a
text/xml equivalent the error messages with not much benefit. My
thoughts on this were - if you're validating HTML, you should be able
to handle a html snippet response -- if you don't want the full
explanation, you can easily use something like
http://us2.php.net/strip_tags within whatever language you're using to
strip out the html tags and return a plain text error message.

>
> P.S. Sometimes, when i query the validator with output=soap12,
> the server doesn't answer. Which is the case right now.
>
> P.P.S It would be also, wonderful if you publish a list of the
> websites that have the validator installed on them, so
> that a soap app can query randomly one server among
> a list of well known servers and thus reduce the charge on
> the W3C server.

Right now I'm not aware of any public mirrors of the validator
services. This sounds like a good idea for some other members of the
web standards movement to grab onto - provide a mirror of the
validation service(s), but some work would have to be done to document
how mirrors are set up, synchronized with the latest versions etc.

>
> Thanks again :)
>
>
> Karim
> --
> http://akoncept.com
> Innovate Humanum Est
>
>


-- 
-Brett Bieber

http:saltybeagle.com aim:ianswerq

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2007 14:10:52 UTC