W3c has silently released a new update for a Markup Validator. The previous version was released in february earlier this year, that is more then 8 month ago – lately i have even started worring if they were still working on improving the validator, but as it seems they are =O).
The most of web designers, who use their services almost daily, have surely noticed some serious changes in the work of the validator. The list of the principal changes is fine:
- A new (experimental) Web Services API
- The proprietary (and experimental) XML output format is deprecated
- New Document type supported: XHTML-Print
- New Character Encoding supported ISO-8859-11 (Thai)
- Usability fix: better error messages for documents with no character encoding declared, and for which the encoding fallback fails
- HTTP Fix: Be more lenient about whitespace and linefeeds in Content-Type
- Usability Fix: Adding the possibility of Doctype Override for SVG Document Types
- Compatibility Fix for OpenSP 1.5.2
- documentation updates and improvements
- Improved Feedback mechanisms
I am especially excited about this feature: Web Services API. Finally a serious improvement in the handling of the requests. The fact, that with the local installation one could publish this services over the net is a very welcome feature. Supporting SOAP 1.2 is a matter of fact a big improvement over the many web services i have seen lately (maybey i wasnt that lucky… =O)).
I have also noticed some warnings appearing over the pages which were parsed without them before (links and &s stuff), but that is the case for a more detailed study in the future…
I hope to live until the day to see the final 1.0 version online published and welcomed by all web comunity. There were a lot of critics lately about W3C’s functionality (and for the most part rightly so), but for the new validator version they have my gratitute at least =o)