Validator Open Community
Introduction
This Wiki was created to show us a current State of validators in providing informations about the documentation, source code, lead, contributions etc... It also allow us a vision of what are these encountered problems and after analyse, provide potentially solutions.
Our analyse give us a current state of validators and allow us these major following problems/challenges :
- Contribution community is very poor
- No enough funding
- Users desert validators because we don't give user support, because validators reports are so complex and because users don't see the utility to run validators on their websites.
At the end of this document, you can find a current state of validators.
Projects Management
By providing a cleaner and more open project development infrastructure, it will ease the management of those projects and make it easier to receive external contributions or bring in new people on board.
Development infrastructure
First goal is a central public place where users will be able to find source code, documentation, issue tracking, but also a platform endorsed by open-source developpers that would ease new contribution.
Ideas to improve development platforms:
- Migrate several of the code bases, documentation and issues list to GitHub
- Provide accurate and up-to-date documentation
- Provide test suites with continuous integration (eg. using Travis CI which has built-in integration with GitHub or Jenkins)
Improve contributions
- Write how to contribute guidelines
- Recognize contributors for their participation (public credits, goodies, credits on validator suite,...)
- Involve students in validator projects (not just internship. school projects should be the best way as they are free). Students could be an inexhaustible resource to help us in improvement & maintain of validators. Contact engineering schools. We can also look for a partnership with Junior-Entreprises: around 20K students in engineering schools and business schools
- Give some rough directions on how to create a new validator. This would explain to community the specifications required for W3C's validator.
User support
How to handle communication/feedback/questions from the community and what to to use (mailing list, issues, forum, stackoverflow...) forum & mailing list are not competitors, just look at different goals.
Mailing lists, which we are using right now, are helpful for bug reporting, suggestions & technical questions. But now, when a young developer have some questions on results or don't understand validators issues he go to ask on others platforms like stackoverflow etc etc....
I suggest to identify 3 categories:
- Bugs reports & suggestions
- Local installation
- Understanding of validator reports
Bugs reports & suggestions
Users need to report bugs or suggest ideas. In the current state if users want to send bug report or suggestions they have to send emails to a mailing-list. These emails are not always answered and the issues are not automatically linked to the source code. Moreover users don't have guideline which say how report a bug or a suggestion.
- Centralize and make all current issues publicly available on GitHub alongside the project source code and documentation
- Write contribution guidelines to explain how to send bug reports or suggestions (for example, users first need to look at current issues to see if their issue was not already reported) (example : http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/NewTicket explain to user how to report bug, open a ticket etc...) -> Improve report quality
- For new ideas provide a features wishlist to which the community will contribute and vote ala https://www.uservoice.com/ (examples : http://wpmuldap.uservoice.com/ http://feedback.gitlab.com/ )
Local installation
Some users or companies need to install the validators locally. In the current state, it is difficult to install these tools because documentation is missing or outdated and often their installation involves many manual steps that could be improved (requirement to install lots of dependencies).
- Update installation documentation
- Simplify install process (improve build and deployment tools)
- Use GitHub issues to report bug while installing
- Use mailing list for help in installation
Understanding of validator reports
Users need to understand validators reports. In the current state, some developers don't understand these reports (too technical, not enough explanation).
- Help on validators report using social forum (community help):
- Leverage an existing one like stackoverflow (see w3c-validation tag)
- Link each report issue to its technical documentation page (web platform, W3C spec, ...)
- Example of Google Cloud Platform using Stack Overflow for their community support:
- https://cloud.google.com/ "Engage with the Cloud Platform community"
- https://cloud.google.com/docs/ "Get Engaged"
- https://cloud.google.com/support/#community "Community Support"
- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/google-app-engine
W3C's Validators dissemination
- Lot of developers don't know that W3C develops and maintains several validators. They need a single place to find all validator projects, a place that will showcase and promote their utilization.
- Each validator needs its own page describing its features and goals to its audience.
- Communication such as software developpment, thanks and contributor recognition, calls to community (eg. using a blog platform for validator communication and relay news of each project) (example: http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/)
Technical improvements
- In some validators reports are not very clear. Maybe rephrase technical issues reported by the validators
- Link each report issue to its technical documentation page (web platform, W3C spec, ...)
- Link report issues to tags on stackoverflow
- Export report as PDF
- Send report by email (with report attached as PDF)
- Write a list of specifications implementation missing for each validator see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21166019/w3c-validator-css3-and-bootstrap
- Develop some modular functionalities which can be used by all validators. (like UI templates, page fetch, parser, formatting of report messages)
- Provide a framework for translating validators' messages
- Provide a feature like http://caniuse.com/ which say if a functionality is implemented or not in all browser.
Random ideas
If you have any other ideas feel free to write them down here and Guillaume will try to incorporate them in this doc.
Current State
Markup Validator
- Lead: none
- Contributors: none
- Service URI: http://validator.w3.org/
- Source code: https://github.com/w3c/markup-validator/
- Documentation: http://validator.w3.org/docs/
- Test Suite: ?
- Issues: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/describecomponents.cgi?product=Validator
- Feedback / mailing list: http://validator.w3.org/feedback.html www-validator@w3.org
- Milestone / ideas: http://validator.w3.org/todo.html
- More docs:
Validator.nu
- Lead: Mike Smith
- Contributors: Henri Sivonen (original developer)
- Service URI:http://validator.nu/ (1)
http://validator.w3.org/nu/ (2)
- Source code: https://github.com/validator
- Documentation:
- http://about.validator.nu/ (1)
- http://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html (2) which redirect to (1) documentation.
- http://validator.github.io/ github doc last version ?
- Test Suite: use https://github.com/w3c/web-platform-tests/tree/master/conformance-checkers (no continuous integration)
- Issues: several places:
- http://bugzilla.validator.nu/
- https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/describecomponents.cgi?product=Nu%20Markup%20Checker (W3C specifics)
- and GitHub issues
- Feedback / mailing list: www-validator@w3.org
- Milestone / ideas: ?
- More docs: ?
- usage statistics
CSS Validator
- Lead: Yves Lafon
- Contributors: Yves Lafon, Carine Bournez
- Service URI: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
- Source code: http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/2002/css-validator/ ( + old import at https://github.com/w3c/css-validator )
- Documentation:
- Test Suite: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/autotest/ ( Regression tests at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/autotest/client/sample.html )
- Issues: https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/describecomponents.cgi?product=CSSValidator (+ ask Yves)
- Feedback / mailing list: mailto:www-validator-css@w3.org Archives
- Milestone / ideas: Check that implementation match latest specs (needs work currently in progress in the CSS WG)
- More docs:
i18n checker (PHP)
Current version in use. orginal PHP version.
- Lead: ?
- Contributors: Richard Ishida, Thomas Gambet
- Service URI: http://validator.w3.org/i18n-checker/
- Source code: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/i18n-checker/
- Documentation: http://validator.w3.org/i18n-checker/about
- Test Suite: ?
- Issues: ?
- Feedback / mailing list: deadlink
- Milestone / ideas: ?
- More docs: ?
- https://www.w3.org/Team/wiki/I18n-checker
- Install doc ask vivien to contribute/update (based on https://github.com/w3c/validator-suite/wiki/I18n-checker )
i18n checker (GSOC Java rewrite)
not deployed
- Lead: ?
- Contributors: Joseph J short, Alexandre Bertails
- Service URI: not deployed
- Source code: https://github.com/w3c/i18n-checker
- Documentation: https://github.com/w3c/i18n-checker
- Test Suite: Continuous integration with Travis CI https://travis-ci.org/w3c/i18n-checker
- Issues: https://github.com/w3c/i18n-checker/issues
- Feedback / mailing list: ?
- Milestone / ideas: ?
- More docs: ?
Mobile Checker
- Lead: Guillaume
- Contributors: Dom, Guillaume
- Service URI: in develoment, not deployed
- Source code: https://github.com/w3c/Mobile-Checker
- Documentation: http://guibbs.github.io/Mobile-Checker-Documentation/
- Test Suite: manual (but Jenkins for continuous integration planified)
- Issues: https://github.com/w3c/Mobile-Checker/issues
- Feedback / mailing list: ?
- Milestone / ideas: https://github.com/w3c/Mobile-Checker/milestones
- More docs: ?
Validator Suite
- Lead: ?
- Contributors: Thomas Gambet, Alexandre Bertails, Vivien Lacourba, Ralph Swick and Ted Guild
- Service URI: https://validator-suite.w3.org/ (This service is being retired)
- Source code: https://github.com/w3c/validator-suite
- Documentation: ?
- Test Suite: https://github.com/w3c/validator-suite/tree/master/test manual (no continuous integration)
- Issues: https://github.com/w3c/validator-suite/issues
- Feedback / mailing list: validator-suite-contact@w3.org
- Milestone / ideas: ?
- More docs: ?
Feed validator
- Lead: ?
- Contributors:
- Service URI: hhttps://validator.w3.org/feed/
- Source code: https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/tree/w3c (forked from https://github.com/rubys/feedvalidator to add templates and https-in-rss support)
- Documentation: ?
- Test Suite: https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/tree/w3c/src/tests (no continuous integration)
- Issues: https://github.com/w3c/feedvalidator/issues
- Feedback / mailing list: public-qa-dev@w3.org
- Milestone / ideas: ?
- More docs: ?
Others
Link Checker, TTML, RDF, ...