Musings

I Came, I Saw, I Validated

Evan’s little essay has exploded like a cluster bomb on the geeky end of the blogosphere. It, and the more general question of whether and why XHTML is so hard and what to do about it, are being discussed and debated here and here and here and here and here and here and yeastily here.

Anyway, having fixed my RSS-syndicated blogroll and my comment-entries it’s become clear that the next step is to get auto-validation for posting. Since I use Kung-Log, the natural thing to ask for is an extension to MovableType’s XML-RPC API. I want an mt.validatePost method whose parameters are basically the same as MovableType’s extension to metaWeblog.newPost, and whose return value is:

Return Value: on success, an array of structs containing boolean isValid, string validatorOutput; on failure, fault.

The method should go through all the steps of creating an individual archive page containing the post (actually, any page will do; the key is to apply all the processing — text filters, etc. — which would normally be applied to the post) but, instead of publishing it, pass the resulting page to the Validator (perhaps a local copy, à la Alexei’s plugin), and return the result.

If we package it up real nice, maybe Adriaan will support it.

LazyWeb, I invoke Thee!