[WSG] Validate Inside Your Firewall

John Horner Sun, 14 Nov 2004 14:09:04 -0800

There was a mention in Scott Parsons' very useful talk (Thursday's Sydney meeting) of the difficulty of validating pages when they were inside a firewall.

I just thought I'd post that it's not impossible, and give you some links to help you install your own validator. I'm not a perl/Linux/Apache guru by any means, quite the opposite -- this advice is offered in the spirit of "if I can do it, how hard can it be?"

Here's the W3Cs page where the validator is offered for download:

     http://validator.w3.org/source/

and here are specific instructions for installing it on Mac OSX from Apple

     http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/validator.html

and some less formal advice from Mediaville

     http://www.mediaville.net/articles/validator/

Here's the relevant link for the installation of the WDG validator (validates whole sites):

     http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/source.html

We had quite an easy run installing the WDG one, simply because we happened to have a server on our network already which was running RedHat 7.x, and I persuaded the Systems guy running it to let me install the validator from one of the packages:

     http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/packages/

So, if you've already got such a thing as a server with a compatible version of Linux, it could be relatively straightforward. If you can spare a Mac OSX machine, either as a whole or don't mind having it run a web server as well as do other work, ditto.

If you haven't got a spare machine, remember that RedHat Linux will run on quite old clunky PCs, and every office has got one of those lying about, surely? All you need now is a spare network connection. I would even venture that this is the kind of project that a work-experience person could do, given the right work-experience person!

Hope that encourages you to try for internal standards-based validation,

jh


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               "Have You Validated Your Code?"
John Horner                            (+612 / 02) 9333 2110
Senior Developer, ABC Online          http://www.abc.net.au/
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[WSG] Validate Inside Your Firewall

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