Unicorn

Unicorn Project Documentation

As of September 2006, Unicorn is available for alpha testing.
» Visit and Test the Unicorn public preview.
Be sure to read the instructions for testing and feedback

W3C, home to the development of the technical specifications known as Web Standards, historically also provides online tools and services to check that content published on the Web follows these specifications, as well as a number of other tools to improve the global quality of Web sites. The most popular are the Markup Validator, CSS Validator, Link Checker...

All these services are individually useful, but it is often cumbersome for developers of Web content to use them all sequentially and test as many aspects of Web quality as possible. The Unicorn Project aims to provide the big picture about the quality of a Web page, by gathering the results of all these tools into a single page.

The Unicorn does not replace each individual validator, it unifies them, and increases their usability by providing a one-step check for the many facets of Web Quality and Web Standards Conformance.

Developer's Corner

If you are the developer of an online validator or a Web quality checking tool, you may want your tool to become an observation module plugged into the Unicorn. Follow these easy three steps:

1. Send a message to the public-unicorn@w3.org public mailing-list, announce that you plan to create a new unicorn observer with your tool.
2. Create and publish the files describing your service, following the Contract Specifications
3. Modify your tool to produce an output following the Observers output Specification

The Unicorn is an open source software tool developed in Java. If you want to play with the Unicorn code and help its development:

• You can Get the Code from our public code repository. As of today, no packaged version has been produced.
• Installation is relatively easy on a system with Java and Tomcat (servlet manager) and Ant installed. Check the README file at the root of the code for installation instructions.
• Interested in how Unicorn works? The Architecture overview explains the basics of what makes the framework tick, and the latest record of the latest code review (2006-09-28) gives insight in how the source code is organized.
• Unicorn uses a number of specific document formats. They are all documented, with examples:
  1. Contract Spec
  2. Tasks Spec
  3. Observers output Spec
  4. Templates Spec
• Also of (historical) interest will be the Requirements - Book of specification, Use cases and Implementation Questions documents, edited during the original development of the tool.

Credits

The original development phase of Unicorn was performed in 2006 by W3C interns Damien Leroy and Jean-Guilhem Rouel, with help and supervision from Bert Bos, Karl Dubost, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Yves Lafon, and olivier Thereaux.

Further development and maintenance of the Unicorn is done under the auspices of W3C's QA-dev Tools development effort.