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Tuesday, February 6, 2007
Bulk Validator Posted
For some time, I have been using a Perl program of my own devising to automate the process of submitting collections of Web pages (for example, all the documents which comprise this chronicle, or the growing collection of Lignières Then and Now photographs) for validation by the World Wide Web Consortium's Markup Validation Service. The program was a crude hack I threw together to get the job done, and relied on having the documents it validated accessible both from the local file system and externally over the Web, which prevented it from being used on projects under development that you don't want to make visible to the public. I have just posted the initial release of BulkValidator, a domesticated version which remedies the shortcomings of the in-house edition and should work for any Perl installation on a Unix-like system with the required modules installed. Files are validated from the local file system, and recursive validation of all HTML/XHTML files in a directory tree is possible. Error reports for files which fail validation are saved in a “discrepancies” directory whence they can be examined in order to fix the problems found by the validator. I am not aware of any reason this program should not work on a Cygwin installation with the find utility installed, but I have not tested it and am not interested in doing so, although patches to remedy any compatibility problems on Cygwin or other systems are, of course, welcome.Posted at February 6, 2007 17:32