On Mar 28, 2007, at 21:24 , Henri Sivonen wrote:
It's been a truly informative and enlightening reading, especially
the parts where you develop on the (im)possibility of using only
schemas to describe conformance to the html5 specs. This is a
question that has been bothering me for a long time, especially as
there is only one (as of today) production-ready conformance
checking tool not based on some kind (or combination) of schema-
based parsers,
I take it that you mean the Feed Validator?
Indeed.
Also, in the future, I'd like to make it super-easy for CMS
developers to integrate the conformance checker back end to their
products. To enable this, the barrier for getting a runnable copy
should be low.
Libraries/APIs in a few languages?
I'm very pessimistic about translations. Even the online markup
checkers whose authors have borne the burden of making the messages
translatable aren't getting numerous translation contributions.
It depends. Projets with large user bases do get a lot of volunteers
for translation.
Indeed. Did you have a chance to look at EARL?
I did. I also had a look at the SOAP and Unicorn outputs of the W3C
Validator. I like EARL the least of the three, because its
assumptions about the nature of the checker software do not work
well with implementations that have a grammar-based schema inside.
Grammar-based implementations cannot cite an exact conformance
criterion when a derivation in the grammar fails as demonstrated by
the EARL output of the W3C Validator. The SOAP and Unicorn formats,
even if crufty to my taste, match better the SAX ErrorHandler
interface.
Interesting, thanks for your thoughts. Which version of EARL did you
look at? If you made your mind based on the earl outputs of the
markup validator, note that it's due for an update. the EARL spec has
gone through a lot of development and changes, and the new version
clearly takes conformance checkers as a use case:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-EARL10-Schema-20070323/
The group developing EARL is really eager to get feedback, so if you
find that it has shortcomings in some areas, I think you could easily
get that changed.
--
olivier