Some suggestions for the SOAP api

> 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.

Yes, I see. You're right, but i keep hope that someday
some big companies like google and co will help with
resources.

Here's how I'm seeing this actually:
User submits url "U" to the validator, this one will look at the
caching headers of "U" if it has already a "still usable" copy of
the validation result, it will serve it. Or if the page changed
since its last validation (always depending on the headers)
or never been submitted to validation, the validator will process
this url and cache the result. But again, you're right, since
all this time saving will require storage space...
That good old dilemma of space and time ;-)


> 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.

Yes, I use this kind of technique for an app that uses the soap
api, by caching locally for 1 minute up to 5 minutes the soap
output of a query just to lighten the harass on the validator server.
You'd ask me to install a copy of the validator... sure I would, but this
will require a dedicated server or at least a VPS which is not
in our budget, we African folks :(

> > 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.

Yes sure, but I'm talking about the "semantic" side of the soap
answer actually. It's IMHO supposed to give us "brut" information
without predefined styling and formatting. For example, the
<p class="helpwanted"> in the m:explanation tag is "superfluous"
since it's up to the response consumer to define its proper way
of formatting (html) and styling (css).

> > 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.
>

Well, yes, but it's always appreciable to use the computation time
of some jobless servers ;-)
So, I'd suggest to start a personal page containing links to available
validator's copies on the web and I invite you all to send your personal
urls and those of your universities :)

Again thanks and sorry for my poor english :)

Karim
--
http://akoncept.com
Innovate Humanum Est

Received on Tuesday, 2 October 2007 20:25:12 UTC