Downloadable CSS checker?

[Stan Brown]

The W3C offers a CSS validator for download
<http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/DOWNLOAD.html> but the build
seems to require a bunch of UNIX tools.

Does anyone know of a downloadable CSS2 validator for DOS or Windows
users? (I searched back to 1988 in Google but couldn't find
anything.)

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Headless]

Stan Brown wrote:

>The W3C offers a CSS validator for download
><http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/DOWNLOAD.html> but the build
>seems to require a bunch of UNIX tools.
>
>Does anyone know of a downloadable CSS2 validator for DOS or Windows
>users? (I searched back to 1988 in Google but couldn't find
>anything.)

All CSS "validators" are in fact CSS checkers, that said, Topstyle has a
CSS check function.

Headless

--
Email and usenet filter list: http://www.headless.dna.ie/usenet.htm

[Jim Dabell]

Stan Brown wrote:

> The W3C offers a CSS validator for download
> <http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/DOWNLOAD.html> but the build
> seems to require a bunch of UNIX tools.

Not at all. You download it with CVS, build it with Ant, and run it with a
JRE. All of these are cross-platform. Knowing what you need and setting
it all up can be a bit of a nightmare though. It's a mountain of effort
for what is, essentially, an extremely simple utility, unless you happen to
have all the Java stuff ready and waiting - especially as it seems you can
only get the source through CVS. Would anybody be interested in a Python
version instead? For some reason Java applications are _always_ a pain in
the arse to get working.

<URL:http://www.cvshome.org/cyclic/cvs/windows.html>
<URL:http://ant.apache.org/>
<URL:http://jakarta.apache.org/>
<URL:http://xml.apache.org/xerces2-j/index.html>

mkdir \cssval
cd \cssval
cvs -d :pserver:anon...@dev.w3.org:/sources/public co 2002/css-validator
cd 2002\css-validator
ant build

Assuming all this goes to plan, the validator will now be inside the
directory \cssval\2002\css-validator\css-validator, which you can move
wherever you like. Just run css-validator.bat from a command-line to
figure out how to use it.

(I've assumed you have already installed cvs, ant, the servlet API and
Xerces correctly and that your path and classpath are set up correctly.
Also, it's rare that I touch Windows, so I may have gotten the command-line
syntax a bit wrong, so watch out.)

PS: I just checked through the steps, and it appears that the current
version of the validator has a bug in it which makes it useless. I hacked
around it by changing the following lines in org/w3c/css/util/HTTPURL.java:

Old version:

// relay authorization information
if (ac.getCredential() != null) {
urlC.setRequestProperty("Authorization",ac.getCredential());
}
// relay languages
if (ac.getLang() != null) {
urlC.setRequestProperty("Accept-Language",ac.getLang());
}

New version:

// relay authorization information
if (ac != null) {
if (ac.getCredential() != null) {
urlC.setRequestProperty("Authorization",ac.getCredential());
}
// relay languages
if (ac.getLang() != null) {
urlC.setRequestProperty("Accept-Language",ac.getLang());
}
}

Note that this is a five-minute hack that is probably all wrong - validating
files is still broken, but at least now validating through HTTP works.
Standard disclaimers apply.

<URL:http://www.cgabriel.org/disclaimer.php>

--
Jim Dabell

[Stan Brown]

In article <-cqdnZUnbu9...@giganews.com> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, Jim Dabell <jim-

use...@jimdabell.com> wrote:
>Stan Brown wrote:
>
>> The W3C offers a CSS validator for download
>> <http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/DOWNLOAD.html> but the build
>> seems to require a bunch of UNIX tools.
>
>Not at all. You download it with CVS, build it with Ant, and run it with a
>JRE. All of these are cross-platform. Knowing what you need and setting
>it all up can be a bit of a nightmare though.

[details snipped]

Thanks, Jim. I guess I was hoping for something stand-alone, like
NSGMLS. I'd have to install a _lot_ of software, just for one tool
that I would use maybe 1% as often as NSGMLS. Also I was hoping for
something runnable from the command line, so I could invoke it in
makefiles. I'll save your article, though, for when I get ambitious.

Pity there's no DTD for CSS, then I could just use NSGMLS on it!