Brent
Simmons: What I could do—what I’d like to
do—is include Mark’s and Sam Ruby’s validator in
NetNewsWire.
+1. I'm in.
This will require some work, none of it hard. Prereqs are
Python 2.x and
pyxml. There
currently are three interfaces: a CGI/web interface, a command
line, and a web interface.
The CGI/web interface contains a number of absolute paths and
direct references to the host. However, this is probably the
best place to start.
The command line interface is designed primarily for
development use. However, something like this that returns
back a simple return code might be useful for your
optional
indicator.
The web service interface accepts a simple HTTP POST,
optionally with SOAP envelope and body elements. This could
be evolved into something that does exactly the same as the above,
but without requiring any installation on the client. Of
course, this would require that the user be online at the time, and
would have quite different performance characteristics.
Overall, probably not the path to pursue in this case.
In any case, none of this work is difficult, and I would be glad
to do it.
I used the feedvalidator 1.3. to mirror it in Latvia. When looked through sources it was obvious that it was not the version that is powering feedvalidator.org, so I wonder are you interested in bug reports and such?
That source should be identical to what was deployed. If not, I would treat that as a bug. In any case, I'm looking into restructuring things to see if that deployment can be done with a single CVS update and the edit of a single configuration file.
I think there are a lot of people who are willing to do a little bit to improve feed quality, if it's not too hard and they can do it from where they are already....
[more]
Funny that although I knew it was open source, I never thought of using it as a private validator, only as a "why would I?" mirror/competitor. Couple of lines of Perl, and now when I save an entry MT validates my feeds. Couple of days of digging through MT, and it may even report errors somewhere better than the activity log and a query string variable that doesn't affect the template like it should.
I had thought about using it as a locally installed validator, but laziness was preventing it. No more! Now when I create an entry and render my pages (home-grown CMS here) it checks all of the feeds that get created. If they don't validate, I'll know it before you do.