The WHATWG Blog

Validation result formats for review

September 11th, 2007 by Henri Sivonen in Conformance Checking

I’d like to enable the use of Validator.nu as a RESTful Web service. To this end, I have designed a Validator.nu-native XML response format.

There is also a JSON format for review.

I’d appreciate comments on the format—especially from people who can foresee wanting to write clients.

Comments on this blog seem to be broken right now. Comments can be sent directly to [email protected] or the the implementors mailing list.

Comments are welcome here.

Pourquoi le texte alternatif peut être omis (French) ↔ The longdesc lottery

2 Responses to “Validation result formats for review”

1. Using SDF for representing the parse tree in both the XML and JSON formats makes the most sense, since it provides a very simple format for representing element trees and doesn’t suffer from the problems with trying to represent non-well formed trees in XML. (e.g. a non-well formed comment from an HTML document). The purpose of a parse tree is for diagnostic information, which becomes much less useful is such information is omitted, as you suggested on IRC.

2. The main issue with the parse tree is whether the parse tree in XML should be easy to extract from XML and dump for human inspection as such or whether it should be optimized transformations by XML tooling so that a tool reading the XML output could with relative ease render the parse tree as a tree widget with collapsable parts, for example.