Offline mode ?

[Ecco]

This gem uses the online W3C validator. That's great! But:

1. It raises some privacy concerns (maybe you don't want to send your document to W3C)
2. It's slow (you need to wait after the network and W3C's servers if they are busy)
3. It doesn't work if you're offline

How about using the offline version of the same tool?

[doc75]

@Ecco, this is a good idea, but not sure how to manage this properly and avoid having external dependencies that have to be installed manually (Java, nvu.jar, etc...).

The advantage of the W3C validator website is that it has no pre-requisite (except to be online).

[doc75]

@Ecco, I just checked and you can already do it thanks to:

NuValidator.new(:validator_uri => 'http://localhost:8888/')

Of course you need to run your checker locally.
I tested it with docker version and it is working fine like that.

Would that meet your requirement ?
If yes, perhaps I'll update the documentation to indicate how it works with the docker version.

[Keirua]

I used the local version using docker, to me it makes sense to close the issue : w3c_validators is a ruby wrapper around the w3c service (which is what I was looking for), not a reimplementation of the core validation mechanisms.

docker run -it --rm -p 8888:8888 validator/validator:latest

validator = NuValidator.new(:validator_uri => 'http://localhost:8888/')

[Keirua]

(oh and off topic, but great job by the way !)

[Ecco]

it makes sense to close the issue : w3c_validators is a ruby wrapper around the w3c service, not a reimplementation of the core validation mechanisms.

I would have to respectfully disagree. I'm glad that it fits your use case, but w3c_validators is supposed to be ruby code to help running w3c validations. The fact that it uses the w3c web services to do so is an implementation detail, and I think my 3 concerns (privacy, speed and availability) are valid.

[Keirua]

It's not an implementation detail, that's the goal of this project, as said on the first line of the readme:

W3C Validators is a Ruby wrapper for the World Wide Web Consortium's online validation services.

This project has ~1600 lines of ruby to wrap the validation result, the w3c validator has 58000 lines of java to perform the validation, so even with a rough estimate that's a very different problem to tackle. Also, having a limited amount of sources of truth (the W3C) for validation makes sense. I've tried many other tools before that only notice xml issues, or in their various ways are not as accurate as the w3c.

Your concerns all are taken care of by the solution we proposed above. validator/validator is open source too, so you can see for yourself regarding privacy and if you dont want to use the available image, you can build it yourself. If you don't want or can't use this, that's a different topic, but changing the scope of the project to fix this does not seem like a good solution.

That being said, I agree that running said docker image in our CI is not as easy as simply including a standalone gem, but that's not the idea in the first place here.