Automatic W3C validation?

[Baron Samedi]

One of my many, many "started with enthusiasm, then quietly abandoned"
projects was to code some PHP which could be included into every page
on my site (blog included) and would verify the page (via the W3C
validator) each time that it was loaded and e-mail me if there were any
problems.

I "quietly abandoned" it when I realized that it was "kewel to kode"
but I don't really know why I wanted it, or how it would work.

On the face of it, I only need to validate each time I change a page.
So, validating with every load seemed ridiculous; which lead me to a
flat file database where I could check the page file's last update date
against its last verification date, thus avoiding unnecessary
validation.

Then it occurred to me that with so many includes (standard header &
footer, etc for menu, hit count, etc), the web page's main file could
be unchanged, but - if an included file were altered - then it might
no longer validate properly.

See my dilemma? So I have put this to one side (since there are plenty
more little projects to code) until I can specify it correctly.

Any comments/suggestions? Anyone know of something similar which
already exists?

Thanks in advance for any fedback.

[R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah]

Baron Samedi wrote:

One of my many, many "started with enthusiasm, then quietly abandoned"
projects was to code some PHP which could be included into every page
on my site (blog included) and would verify the page (via the W3C
validator) each time that it was loaded and e-mail me if there were any
problems. <snip> Any comments/suggestions? Anyone know of something similar which
already exists?

http://in.php.net/tidy

--
<?php echo 'Just another PHP saint'; ?>
Email: rrjanbiah-at-Y!com Blog: http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/

[Faust]

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:

Baron Samedi wrote:

One of my many, many "started with enthusiasm, then quietly abandoned"
projects was to code some PHP which could be included into every page
on my site (blog included) and would verify the page (via the W3C
validator) each time that it was loaded and e-mail me if there were any
problems.

<snip>

Any comments/suggestions? Anyone know of something similar which
already exists?

http://in.php.net/tidy

hi, Raj,

rather a cryptic comment, don't you think? How is that supposed to
help?

[R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah]

Faust wrote:

R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah wrote:

Baron Samedi wrote:

One of my many, many "started with enthusiasm, then quietly abandoned"
projects was to code some PHP which could be included into every page
on my site (blog included) and would verify the page (via the W3C
validator) each time that it was loaded and e-mail me if there were any
problems.

<snip>

Any comments/suggestions? Anyone know of something similar which
already exists?

http://in.php.net/tidy

hi, Raj,

rather a cryptic comment, don't you think? How is that supposed to help?

If you have rather followed the link and read the contents, you
might have realized how helpful it is. I'm personally not for mirroring
php document in c.l.php. I also prefer not to use sock puppet
<http://www.answers.com/sock%20puppet> tricks.

--
<?php echo 'Just another PHP saint'; ?>
Email: rrjanbiah-at-Y!com Blog: http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/

[Faust]

I certainly agree that this is very helpful information. I am just not
sure how it answers the question.

Does there already exist some PHP code to invoke the W3C validator
every time that a page is loaded? Is this even a good idea? (maybe it
should be done by cron job?)

Yes, your link is great help for pasring the elements of an HTML page -
no arguement - it just didn't seem to anwser the question, and just
posting the link with no indictaion of why it was relevent doesn't seem
to help.

But, I don't want to start an argument, so please ignore this if it
offends you.

[Faust]

And sorry for the sock puppet. I just switched google accounts without
noticing.

[Balazs Wellisch]

"Faust" <gr****@gmx.net > wrote in message
news:11******** **************@ g49g2000cwa.goo glegroups.com.. .

I certainly agree that this is very helpful information. I am just not
sure how it answers the question.

If you scroll down a little bit on that page you will find:

http://in.php.net/manual/en/function...parse-file.php

Isn't that what you were asking for? You can use tidy to parse, validate and
repair any PHP document. (As long as it generates HTML of course.)

Balazs

[Faust]

Wow! You are correct. That will do it. Sorry, Raj, I missed that,
drowned in information. If you had just added that one sentence it
would have been most helpful.

What I didn't bother to mention, because I didn't think that it was
relevant, was that I have already written code to invoke the W3C
validator and to parse the result. But I can certainly replace it with
this. Thanks to both of you.

Now we have the practical solution of *how* to validate an html page,
and we come to the philosphical questions of *whether* and *when* to
validate it.

Is it a good approach to validate a page each time that it loads?
Probably not, since this adds overhead, both to the page load and to
the W3C servers.

Perhaps each time that it changes? But what if the page doesn't change,
but some include, or its include does? How to know that?

Aha! perhaps I can compute a checksum of the dispalyed page and
validate if that changes. Hmm, no, this is no good on pags with hit
counters or any other variable content which can change but will never
break validation?

Maybe I should just have a cron job to validate my site overnight, or
once a week and email me if anything does not validate.

See what I mean? That's the sort of thing that I would like to disucss.
What do you think?

Thanks in advance

[Balazs Wellisch]

Is it a good approach to validate a page each time that it loads?
Probably not, since this adds overhead, both to the page load and to
the W3C servers.

I have not verified this, but I doubt tidy would add a lot of overhead.
Especially if you have a caching engine running, like Zend Optimizer. If you
run any benchmarks please post the results.

Thanks,
Balazs

[R. Rajesh Jeba Anbiah]

Faust wrote:
<snip>

Is it a good approach to validate a page each time that it loads?
Probably not, since this adds overhead, both to the page load and to
the W3C servers.

<snip>

Tidy is an extension and it won't contact W3C servers. Read the
manual closely again. FWIW, check this link too
<http://www.zend.com/php5/articles/php5-tidy.php>

--
<?php echo 'Just another PHP saint'; ?>
Email: rrjanbiah-at-Y!com Blog: http://rajeshanbiah.blogspot.com/