[thelist] adding "validate" button and code cleanup to cms editor

Scott Blanchard octigonuser at hotmail.com
Mon May 3 18:10:13 CDT 2004


If you have read my posts in the past, you might be aware that I am in 
leading a team of developers charged with converting a commercial CMS suite 
to support and enforce web standards.

The thought has occured to me that in order to help users contribute valid 
xhtml in the context of our wysiwyg editing interface for content, it would 
be nice to give users a quick way to send the contents of their edit to the 
w3c's validator and allow them to see any potential problems that need to be 
addressed prior to saving the content edit.

Of course, this is best accompanied with an automated process that seeks to 
streamline the code that is produced and if neccessary, limit the formatting 
options available to them such as font selectors or table creation wizards 
in favor of heading and class selection tools for example, so that the code 
is as valid as possible without any outside intervention - and that is part 
of our editing platform out of the box, or at least we have given it our 
best shot.

However, I am curious if any of you have thoughts on the merits of a 
"validate this" button in the toolbar that will allow both non-technical and 
technical content editors to in effect "pre-flight" their content with 
minimal hassle prior to submitting it.

For example, for this to be worthwhile it would have to be quite a bit more 
user friendly than the raw content validator at w3c. In order to make this 
happen, we would have to build a wizard that perhaps uses a web service 
architecture to interface with the validator so that results could be 
presented in a clean interface and on button cleanup facilities could be 
provided to send validated code back to the editor via script.

Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated...



a measureDo you think its possible to interface with the validator in such a 
way as to create a cu

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