Validator Open Community

From W3C Wiki

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).

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

Validator.nu

  • Lead: Mike Smith
  • Contributors: Henri Sivonen (original developer)
  • Service URI:http://validator.nu/ (1)

http://validator.w3.org/nu/ (2)

CSS Validator

i18n checker (PHP)

Current version in use. orginal PHP version.

i18n checker (GSOC Java rewrite)

not deployed

Mobile Checker

Validator Suite

Feed validator

Others

Link Checker, TTML, RDF, ...

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