Month: February 2004

I ended up getting the W3C‘s MarkUp Validator installed properly on Mac OS X 10.2.8. There were just some minor ‘gotchas’ along the way. The best advice I can give is to READ! Yes, RTFM, and then read it again…

My software installs usually go like this: Attempt an install, with a basic skimming of the docs, and if it doesn’t work, start really reading the docs…

I ended up installing gettext, then libiconv again (as suggested) and then Text::Iconv (following David Wheeler’s notes) and that fixed the big problem….

As for the second problem, well, that’s my own stupid fault. See, I edited a config file using pico, and I forgot that when you copy text, and then paste it, it turns tabs into spaces. Since name/value pairs need to be separated by a tab, this broke things. That’s just one of those sanity check things so I think I get a free pass on that one.

So in summary, I’ve now got the W3C‘s MarkUp Validator running locally on Mac OS X. You can just feel the exciting building!

I finally got around to installing the W3C‘s MarkUp Validator locally. (Yes, more validators!) It’s now running on Red Hat Linux 7.2 inside the firewall, for use by the internal folks. I also attempted an install on Mac OS X 10.2.8 (using this guide) but I’m not quite there yet. I’ll be trying again…

Anyway, the install on Linux was not too difficult, requiring OpenSP, libiconv, and some perl modules. (Let’s put it this way, it’s much easier than a Bugzilla install.) I’m glad I finally did this, as another project I’m working on needs a validator installed locally.

Chris Gulker notes that Microsoft makes use of Linux, just like all those average Joe’s who use Google on a daily basis.

Linux is like that, people tend to benefit from it, often without even knowing it. I think that’s got to change, and 2004 might be the year that happens…

Dave Winer has a new RSS Validator. It appears to be using the Feed Validator source code (coming soon to SourceForge, but available today at feedvalidator.org) as the backend.

The odd thing is, it parses Atom 0.3 feeds and reports them as RSS. This was reported to Dave yesterday. The service appears to be in place to promote RSS as a syndication format, and I have no problem with that. For many uses RSS is great, and exactly what should be used. In other cases Atom is a good choice.

Obviously though, an Atom feed is not valid RSS, but the RSS Validator does not tell you this. Dave could have just disconnected the Atom stuff, and made it a pure RSS validator, but I think the high road would have been to issue a message like so:

You have attempted to validate an Atom feed. This system is for the validation of RSS feeds. If you wish to validate an Atom feed, please use the Feed Validator.

Now, if Dave really thinks RSS is superior to Atom, or has advantages Atom does not (and I’m sure it does) he would have no problem doing this.

On the other hand, if the desire is to promote RSS, and pretend Atom does not exist, well, I don’t have a good suggestion for that one…

Syndic8 now supports Atom. This is good, I think the Syndic8 guys will bring to light some of the issues that other Atom folks might not have dealt with in the syndicated feed world.