Re: The validation service doesn't support PHP

On 7 Nov 2014, at 15:51, Benjamin Lehmann wrote:

> You cannot check PHP files with your validation service.

That's because it is a *markup* validation service, and PHP isn't 
markup.

> I would either recommend adding full PHP support

Any decent tool to test the validity of the HTML generated by PHP would 
have to run the PHP repeatedly with different input so that sufficient 
different outputs were all tested. Coming up with good, generic input 
(which would vary query strings, POST data, headers) would be very 
difficult and end up with an enormous list and still miss plenty of 
cases. Running through that huge list would put a lot of load on the 
computer running the validation service.

Any test data needs to be tailored for the specific PHP program. This 
problem is far better solved in the test suite for the PHP than at the 
validator. The tests can run the PHP with suitable input, capture the 
output and then hand it over for validation (using [the API][1]).

> or treating PHP files as HTML, and ignore the <?php ?> tags.

Again, lots of PHP programs would fail because the effects of running 
the PHP code are required to get valid markup output from the program.

[1]: http://validator.w3.org/docs/api.html

-- 
David Dorward
http://dorward.co.uk/