Re: Webcheck todo list

[Arthur de Jong <arthur [at] arthurdejong.org>]

On Sun, 2010-10-03 at 23:12 +0200, m.v.wesstein wrote:
> I tried your program today and I'm glad to report it works once I copied 
> the entire directory into the location you suggested in the README file, 
> as well as making both sym-links. Thanks for making this software 
> possible, very useful indeed.

Thanks for your email.

> a) there is no referral in the README on how to access the processed 
> data and where to find it. This would be a quick "fix" though. Perhaps 
> you could amend the program to have it automatically creates a temporary 
> directory, using the URL as base for the name, if the -o flag is 
> omitted. (i.e. when the link refers to http://www.example.com the temp 
> dir would be named "example", unless the user specifies the dir with -o 
> <mydir>)

The default location is the current directory (it is in the README
file). The starting point is the index.html file. Perhaps some other
default output directory would be better, however this could get complex
and ugly with longer URLs. Perhaps making the -o option mandatory is a
way to go?

> b) in the TODO list you've mentioned checking for W3C conformance. Not 
> being a coder you might be interested in this line of thought: the W3C 
> validator at http://validator.w3.org refers to the link under test (LUT) 
> in the request, like this:
> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=${URL}&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
>  
> where ${URL} is the LUT.

I don't think it is nice to hit the W3C validator for a possibly very
large number of pages that webcheck visits. Also, webcheck can use the
tidy interface that does most of the validity checking already locally
(it seems the TODO file is somewhat out-of-date). The Debian package has
a recommendation on python-utidylib for that.

> c) on the subject of packages: Webcheck has the potential to become the 
> default web-checking tool for the OSS community. This is, however, 
> hampered by the lack of packages for various distributions: in Debian 
> Stable no package is available. In principle, only 2 packages have to be 
> created: an RPM version for Red Hat and similar and a Debian package 
> that can also be used by its derivatives like Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

A Debian package is available for some time (it even was in etch):
  http://packages.debian.org/webcheck
but if you have any improvements feel free to contribute them.

I don't know much about creating RPMs though but I think there are
several RPMs floating around out there.

-- 
-- arthur - arthur@arthurdejong.org - http://arthurdejong.org --

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