first questions on validator.nu

Hi Henri, all.

Henri, as we discussed last month at the TPAC, I started playing with  
the validator.nu software. It has some really cool features and a  
number of ideas worth noting and developing, and I wanted to explore  
the possibility of hosting an instance for a W3C audience, and if  
possible, bring something in return to the project.

Since I started playing, I had a number of questions piling up. I will  
list a number of them here before they slip away, but if you would  
prefer me to open a separate thread for each of the questions/ideas,  
here or in another forum, that's ok too. I'm copying the public-qa-dev  
list [ http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qa-dev/ ] since it  
is read by a number of people interested and interesting - I'm  
thinking of Yves, who'd know a lot about servlets and Jigsaw, Mike who  
already played with validator.nu in the past, and others.

Questions and thoughts are a bit in a random order. Hope they will  
make sense.

* Installation *

I find the building mechanism you adopted rather fascinating. The fact  
that the build script goes and fetch all dependencies and files  
automatically, and starts the servlet, is great. A downside of this is  
that the number of dependencies downloaded is huge! About half a  
gigabyte, with a number of jars present in multiple instances (ant,  
xerces-impl). Have you thought of a way to keep the number of jars to  
a minimum, perhaps by renaming them and keeping them all in a single  
directory?

* Opensourciness *

In a discussion with Mike we were wondering if the tool could be  
distributed as open source. I've seen licenses for the html5parser,  
but apparently not for the whole. We were also wondering if the  
dependencies were all OSS-friendly.

* Running as servlet *

I found the class that runs the validator per se  
(nu.validator.servlet.Main) which indeed works nicely, but it uses its  
own standalone server (it wraps around jetty?). It would be nice to  
have a way to run this as a servlet from an existing jetty/tomcat/ 
jigsaw (I'm particularly interested in running an instance on jigsaw).  
Is that possible? I couldn't find any doc on this yet.

* All dynamic *

I see that the interface is dynamic (nu.validator.servlet.FormEmitter)  
Would it make sense to have this as a static document? Having the main  
interface be a dynamic resource would be costly for a high-traffic  
service. Also, the lack of static documents served along with the  
servlet means that stylesheets are hardcoded to pointing to http://hsivonen.iki.fi 
, which is subpar.

* Code review / doc-a-thon *

Have you done code reviews of the validator in the past? A webcast or  
teleconference-based intro would be very cool, it would be a great way  
to present the features and quite likely help write doc on the fly /  
interest people in participating in code. I'm sure we could organize  
something. Would you be interested?

* SVG validation *

knowing that validator.nu had RNG and nvdl capabilities, I was  
particularly interested in seeing how it worked with SVG. I haven't  
had time to extensively test with a lot of SVG.

I noticed it only has one SVG schema. I wonder if it would be possible  
to preparse documents with SVG media type and look for version and  
baseprofile attributes on the root element, switching between SVG  
tiny, basic and full based on that.

I tried validating an SVG document with a number of foreign namespace  
content in it (typical sodipodi/inkscape output) and found that the  
validator.nu complained about these. Is it on purpose? I've heard a  
lot of arguments in favor of dropping anything in namespaces not known  
by the validator, and/or using nvdl to validate foreign namespace  
fragments. Is that something validator.nu can do, is it planned? I'm  
certain this would be a fantastic tool for the adoption of SVG.

Thanks!
-- 
olivier

Received on Thursday, 6 December 2007 07:19:45 UTC