Web IDL validation in spec-prod GitHub action

Hi spec editors,

A couple of weeks ago, the spec-prod GitHub action [1], that some of you 
already use to check and publish specs to GitHub Pages and /TR, was 
updated to add a Web IDL validation step. This was done automatically 
(and went smoothly as far we can tell) but we thought you might want to 
know :)

The goal of this validation step is to make sure that you can catch 
invalid Web IDL constructs early on, typically at the pull request phase 
where the action checks the resulting document.

Web IDL validation is enabled by default. The VALIDATE_WEBIDL option may 
be used to turn it off if you notice issues [2]. That said, validation 
should not have any side effects on specs that do not include Web IDL, 
so please report any issue that you may encounter!

Spec authoring tools already include some level of Web IDL validation. 
If you are using ReSpec to author your spec, this Web IDL validation 
step will not bring much because ReSpec already validates the Web IDL 
contained in the spec. If you are using Bikeshed, this Web IDL 
validation step may prove useful as it checks a number of Web IDL 
constraints that Bikeshed currently does not validate.

Please note that passing this validation step is not a guarantee that 
your Web IDL is valid. The validation step currently only checks the Web 
IDL contained in your spec in isolation. There may remain validation 
errors if your Web IDL references IDL constructs such as dictionaries 
defined in other specs. We will try to improve the validation step over 
time. In the meantime, these validation failures eventually get caught 
when we release new versions of the @webref/idl npm package [3] and we 
typically report them through pull requests or issues in the spec 
repository when validation of Web IDL fragments across all 
specifications fails.

Thanks,
Francois.

1. https://github.com/w3c/spec-prod/
2. https://w3c.github.io/spec-prod/#validate_webidl
3. https://www.npmjs.com/package/@webref/idl - a package that contains a 
curated view of Web IDL fragments across Web specifications

Received on Thursday, 23 September 2021 16:24:08 UTC