RasterWeb!

Dave is meeting with the IE team.

I want to talk about how the browser can be made more useful to people who use RSS and who write weblogs. I’m going to ask for features that work for all blogging software and all aggregators, foolish me, maybe I’m the only one who thinks we all do better if everyone has a chance to compete.

Um, Dave, you do realize that the next version of IE will be a pay-to-play affair. As IE for Windows will only be included when you purchase Longhorn, and IE for Mac will only be available if you purchase MSN. So if you really want to help “all blogging software and all aggregators” and want us all to have “a chance to compete” will you also be meeting with the Mozilla folks, the Opera folks, the Safari folks?

The funny thing is, if Dave wanted to make the browser work better for these things, he might do well to look at the Mozilla project, which has a huge pile of extensions at MozDev, many of which aim to make the browser known as Mozilla a better blogging and aggregator component. If Mozilla has these components, and they are done right, won’t Microsoft sit up and take notice, and do something about it?

Dave is getting closer… He’s released a new service for people who want to be sure their feeds are in good shape.

I say getting closer because it’s a step in the right direction. It’s aimed toward people who want to make sure the feeds they have online are valid. That’s a good thing.

I went a step further. The software used to publish this site attempts to validate the feeds produced at publish time. Meaning, I create an entry, the feeds are produced, and then they are checked for validity. If I screw up and write some invalid markup, I know it right away, before the feeds ever get published.

Here’s an example: Let’s say I accidentally paste in some HTML and end up with an extraneous </a> in my text. When I render out my pages, I’d see an error like this: line 37, column 149: XML Parsing error: <unknown>:37:149: mismatched tag.

Now, here’s the interesting part. The feedvalidator doesn’t see any problems with the RSS 2.0 feed, it reports ‘No errors or warnings’ for it, but the Atom feed is the one that returns the error. Since I screwed up and created invalid markup, I’d expect an error. You can make your own call here as to whether having an unmatched </a> is screwed up or not. (Add stuff about XML, strictness, etc. if you wish.)

Oh, we also run the HTML output through Tidy to check for well-formedness, and lo and behold that stray </a> is reported by Tidy as: line 117 column 148 - Error: unexpected </a> in <p>.

Now all this does not mean that errors won’t slip through the cracks every now and then, but it makes it that much harder to let them slip through. Since we’re calling existing applications and libraries, the whole process of adding in these checks took very little time. The majority of time was spent installing the software and figuring out how it worked. There’s also less than a dozen lines of code to actually do the checks and report the errors. I know that this can’t be built into all publishing system quite so easily, but it is getting easier to do these sorts of things everyday.

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…