Re: [libcroco-list] libcroco as a CSS validator

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi gmx net>]

* Emmanuel Saracco wrote:
>In fact I am really interesting by a real CSS validator using libcroco.
>Does it already exists some projects?

The current W3C CSS Validator is maintained by the W3C QA Dev effort, 
<http://esw.w3.org/topic/QaDev>, we've so far exchanged ideas on the
#validator IRC channel on irc.freenode.org some of which are archived
in the meeting minutes linked above. The current CSS Validator suffers
from having everything hard coded in more than 800 Java files, pretty
much one for each property in each profile (css1, css2, tv profile,
etc.) which does not scale well. The idea was to do schema-based
validation instead and we had some brainstorming on that, Microsoft
Visual Studio.NET uses such a language, and I had some quick notes on
<http://www.websitedev.de/css/schema/draft/>.

What we are currently investigating though is to use XML Schema tools
to perform the actual validation, so I wrote a css2xml tool that dumps
libcroco data structures to some XML format and I'm currently looking
into validating such XML documents with RELAX NG and Schematron. It
seems to work well and it's clearly the cheapest option. How to map
the error and warning messages from the RNG+Schematon validator back
into something that could be presented to CSS Validator users is as
yet an unsolved problem, but it should not be too difficult to get
something reasonable here. The current CSS Validator's error messages
aren't that great either...
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