can we validate?

May 27, 2001 10:01 AM

Matt has said that a lot of the maintenance work he does is fixing HTML errors. Does anyone know of an easy way to run posts through an HTML Validator and reject the ones that don't pass?
posted by rcade to Feature Requests at 10:01 AM (5 comments total)

Of course the easiest approach is to permit little or no HTML, and close all the allowed tags by default. There are several code-snippets out there for writing bulletin boards that will do this, but the ones I know of are perl/php based, not java/coldfusion.
posted by dhartung at 10:16 AM on May 27, 2001

This seems like a good use of an XML-RPC or SOAP web service -- send a post and get back a response indicating whether it's valid or not.
posted by rcade at 10:50 AM on May 27, 2001

There's a rough-and-tumble way to use Microsoft Word's spell checker on IE on Windows, but it's a bit inelegant in exchange for its power.

(Scroll down to the second section on that page.)
posted by anildash at 12:34 AM on May 28, 2001

I know WebLint isn't being actively maintained anymore, but it does still work -- we use it in my office to quickly debug HTML.
posted by briank at 11:00 AM on May 28, 2001

Gawd, I cringe at the thought of tossing more work on Matt's lap...

However, might I suggest a Blogger-type interface where you have bold, italic & link buttons near the comments box...similar to Ultimate Bulletin Board (But no emoticons PLEEEEASE!)

I don't know about Greymatter, but I switched over to Newspro (the site is occasionally down if the link is dead), and they have an add-on for HTML, in case a poster gets lazy. Maybe he can examine the snippets of code to implement it for Cold Fusion.
posted by EricBrooksDotCom at 10:40 PM on May 28, 2001