XHTML1.0 compliance has always been something seen as desireable for TWiki. I'm not particularly hung up on it myself, but if it really is seen as worthy then we need a set of automated tests for verifying compliance.

I don't have any particular ideas on how this could be done. Does anyone want to pick up on this? It would be really good if we could do it for Dakar.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 12 Jan 2005

PatternSkin is XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant. There are test links on PatternSkinDev, but I need to reinstall the test TWiki on my server. Also some minor errors have been introduced since September, but these will be easy to repair before Dakar.

-- ArthurClemens - 12 Jan 2005

I put some code into test/lib/W3CValidator.pm that should help. It's basically a programmatic interface to the W3C validator service. Someone still needs to think about what should be validated, though.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 13 Jan 2005

This was discussed a lot a while back - basically, you can't make users enter valid XHTML so it's unclear how useful it is to have just the TWiki-generated parts of the page as XHTML compliant. I think we should focus on other areas since this doesn't have much benefit in practice due to the ability to enter any HTML.

-- RichardDonkin - 13 Jan 2005

I see validation as a debugging tool during development. It gives you a set of rules to comply with. For instance it tells you not to put a div inside a span - this saves you from most unexplicable quirks in some browsers. And once a template is validated it is easier to repair html bugs that are introduced later on.

-- ArthurClemens - 14 Jan 2005

Fair enough. But I have made code changes. How do I know if my code changes have broken what was previously valid XHTML generated by that code?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 14 Jan 2005

In Codev we can create a couple of test pages, without content, each with a link to the validator page. Or one page with links of all the possible templates. So it will have a link to W3C validator for the edit page, one link for the attach page, for attachagain, etc.

-- ArthurClemens - 14 Jan 2005

That's more like it; though as you know I am keen on test automation. I'd really like the results to be output as part of the automatic test report at http://ntwiki.ethermage.net/users/develop/pub/TestOutput/runtest.html

-- CrawfordCurrie - 14 Jan 2005

for development and testing purposes, i added a link to http://validator.w3.org/check/referer on http://ntwiki.ethermage.net/~develop/cgi-bin/view/TestCases/WebLeftBar

-- WillNorris - 16 Jan 2005

Reckon that's good enough for Dakar. As such, this is ready for merge.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 13 Feb 2005