Even more software: MTValidate

It turns out that even though XML was not designed to be human-writable, humans write it anyway. Humans like me. In my weblog. And it seems like two out of three times I validate my XHTML, it doesn’t. Sometimes because I didn’t close a <li> tag, or because I keep forgetting that <blockquote> doesn’t nest inside <p>, but I also keep trying to embed links (usually to LiveJournal) without escaping & first.

There are probably lower-tech solutions to these problems, but mine was to take the source code to the W3C MarkUp Validation Service and hack it into a Movable Type plugin, so my entries can be automatically validated before I post them, and I can fix any parsing errors before they get published. You can download MTValidate along with my other MT plugins.

3 thoughts on “Even more software: MTValidate

  1. Quetions:
    What needs to be configured in validator.conf?
    How do I know if I have “The Perl modules and OpenSP programs required by the W3C source code.”

    Thank you!

  2. You probably don’t really need to change anything in validator.conf, except that you’ll need to make sure SGML_Parser is set to the location of your copy of onsgmls.

    As for Perl modules, you’ll need to have all the modules installed that are listed on the W3C source page. If you use CPAN to install Perl modules, just tell it to install the latest versions of the listed modules and you’ll be fine.

    You’ll also need to install OpenSP if you don’t already have it, for the onsgmls SGML parser. If you already have version 1.5 or later of onsgmls on your system, you’re fine.

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