Consistent URIs For Compliance Checking (1) Background The importance of checking compliance with standards is well-understood by digital library developers. However checking appears to be rarely carried out for a number of reasons: Lack of or cost of checking tools Failure for checking tools to be integrated with authoring process Use of authoring tools to edit fragments of resources The Challenge The challenge if to provide authors with a cost-effective tool for validating documents. Ideally the tool should be usable for checking related areas.

Consistent URIs For Compliance Checking (2) The approach used is to provide an interface to Web-based checking services via a standard URI. Simply append ,validate to any URI on an appropriately-configured Web site will run an HTML validator on the page being viewed Comments This approach: Is easy to use Require no software to be installed Is easy to configure Can be extended to other areas, such as checking CSS, links, etc.

Consistent URIs For Compliance Checking (3) Implementation This approach is implemented using a simple server-side redirect. On an Apache server the following line should be added to the server configuration file: RewriteRule /(.*),validate http://validator.w3.org/check? uri=http://www.server.org/$1 [R=301] where www.server.org should be replaced by the name of your own server. Proposal For Consistent URIs In order to ensure that end users have a consistent interface for accessing a number of key checking services the following URIs are proposed: ,validate HTML validation ,rvalidate Recursive HTML validation ,cssvalidate CSS validation ,checklink Link check ,rchecklink Recursive link check ,http-headers Display HTTP headers Further Information For further information see the paper at <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/ papers/iadis-2003/>.