Installation and development information
for the W3C Markup Validator
Table of Contents
This document is an overview of how developers
can modify the Markup Validator, and how to contribute to the development
of the project. It is intended for system administrators and developers.
This is not end user documentation. See the User
Manual for usage instructions.
Participating in the development
of the Markup Validator
The Markup Validator is managed as an open source project by a team
of volunteer developers and people from the W3C Team.
Help on this project is always welcome, usually as feedback,
but developers may also be interested in working directly on the code,
which is certainly encouraged.
This document tries to give a general overview of the development framework
for the Markup Validator, and should help developers get a good idea of
how the project is managed.
The next steps would certainly be to read about source
availability and then try a local installation
of the validator, if not done yet. We also (obviously) recommend to get
in touch with other developers, either through regular
means, or on the IRC channel #validator on irc.freenode.net where
many developers and contributors often are.
Development Framework
Bug and Issue Tracking System
Bug and Issue Tracking for the Validator happens in the W3C Public Bugzilla instance.
Developers should feel free to set up an account and report bugs, enhancement
requests, patches, etc. directly there (end users should continue to send
reports and ideas to the mailing
list).
Test suite
Any changes to the service will attempt to maintain compatibility with
a list of test cases.
We are in the process of turning this (crude) list into a more manageable
testing framework.
TODO
The TODO list for the Validator is online at <http://validator.w3.org/todo.html>.
This is probably the best place to start.
However this list is by no means comprehensive. Feel free to suggest
other features that should be on this list or send patches for your favourite
feature.
Keep in mind that features should be of general utility and that the
point if the validator is that it does an objective validation
instead of just what some random developer happens to think is a Good
Idea®. While extra features are nice, they shouldn't dilute the value
of the validator as an objective check.
