Comments on: An idea http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/ Made in New Zealand from local and imported ingredients Sat, 19 May 2012 21:18:21 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Validating is like flossing « Rowan Simpson http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-8622 Fri, 02 Jan 2009 08:56:05 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-8622 [...] while back I wrote about an idea I had for solving some of these [...]

]]> By: Tim Haines http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-880 Wed, 30 May 2007 00:50:02 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-880 It could also be an interesting service to offer via a website. Publicly accessible websites could be indexed by the engine, and a report mailed to the siteadmin with all the errors/warnings.

]]> By: Tim Haines http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-873 Tue, 29 May 2007 10:13:37 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-873 You want to be able to automate it in your build process. Sure have an extension in Firefox to create some of the scripts in the first place. But what would be really cool is if you could tweak the scripts afterward to make it easier to test a range of scenarios, and then automate the running of them each time you check a change into your source repository.

]]> By: Matthew http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-867 Tue, 29 May 2007 01:22:33 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-867 I guess I’d write this as a firefox plugin that posts RESTfully to a web-server api hosted at trademe. People could install the plugin and it’d send back any pages that had validation errors.

To think about this more generically though (not just about TradeMe) users would install a ‘Validation Feedback’ plugin and when visiting a new site with a meta tag of [meta name="ValidationFeedback" content="url=http://trademe.co.nz/validationfeedback.html"/] it would ask the user whether they wanted to assist and – if so – it’d do so transparently in the future. This way it’s more abstract than just about TradeMe.

It doesn’t seem like there’d be any point to storing up lots of validation feedbacks to send in batch… I suppose there’d be some redundancy over multiple files that a zip archive could take advantage of. Seems like a nice optimisation though rather than a core feature though, pretty negligible difference. Also if you get overwhelmed it’d be easy to tell users to stop sending in feedback… just ditch the meta tag.

(BTW, can we get a preview comment option on this blog? I was going to post some HTML but then I don’t know what filters you have Rowan)

Oh, and everyone should use Docvert, ok? It just makes sense :)

Cheers,

]]> By: Charles Vallance » Rowan Simpson's Idea http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-858 Mon, 28 May 2007 10:29:26 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-858 [...] was reading a blog entry from Mr Rowan Simpson (of trademe fame) about an idea he had and I think he’s onto a [...]

]]> By: Mike Cochrane http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-844 Sun, 27 May 2007 05:27:57 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-844 Reading you post I immediately though that would be a cool addition to Charles. But Glen bet me to communicating that. The FireFox web developer toolbar has ‘Validate Local HTML’ but this requires you to actually do it. A report at the end of a browsing session, or in real time, of pages that have errors would be great.

]]> By: Pete http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-806 Fri, 25 May 2007 08:06:42 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-806 On a bespoke CMS i looked after a few years ago, the system had added validation of any new pages, or edits through Tidy as part of it’s workflow. Docvert can use Trang as part of the pipeline process.

Your idea sounds like a validation version of Live HTTP Headers

]]> By: Nigel Ramsay http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-801 Thu, 24 May 2007 23:09:25 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-801 Validation on the Mac – I use the Web Developer Toolbar, which has:

- Validate HTML
- Validate Local HTML

plus validation for CSS, feeds, links, accessibility.

It submits your content to W3C and others.

]]> By: Glen Barnes http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-798 Thu, 24 May 2007 20:59:25 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-798 Have you seen Charles from Karl at Cactus Lab? This is an HTTP proxy which already logs all the traffic from IE or Firefox. Maybe he should plug in a validator to this so it would do what you want. That would be an interesting tool.

]]> By: Lindsay Wright http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-791 Thu, 24 May 2007 12:40:37 +0000 http://rowansimpson.com/2007/05/25/an-idea/#comment-791 I still haven’t done my own website but I look after several. The joys of being busy. Your comment about an XHTML background validator rang some bells with me. I think it would be a excellent idea, and maybe some sort of Javascript and css validation as well. A plugin seems the obvious choice.

I leave my FireFox Javascript console open while I’m developing pages; it shows me error in scripts as well as css and some other errors. Then I go to some other internet site and the errors just pour out. The trademe.co.nz front page is pretty good, it only has six (all minor css errors). The BNZ has 18. That’s a worry.

Best of luck in the new job.

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