

Ask HN: Please critique vldtr - jeroen
http://vldtr.com/

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Edinburger
Nice piece of work. A few observations: (1) It would be good to be able to
link from the site name itself in the results rather than having to hit the
W3C/HTML/Trash icons. Also, I would show the icons by default rather than only
on hover since otherwise the user might not discover them. (2) The randomly
changing background color on your page is 'cool' but it can be confusing for
the user. A few times I thought I'd back-buttoned onto a different site. (3)
This is a very minor point but the vertical lines which contain the 'body' of
the homepage look a little 'out' at some zoom levels on FF 3.0.12.

HTH.

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flooha
+1 Do you have ideas for more features? Since the validation gets passed to
W3C, the main or only added feature is saving your URL list.

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jeroen
I started building this after a typo in one of my (otherwise perfectly valid)
sites totally broke the layout in IE. With vldtr I now have an easier first
line of defense against such breakage.

Another site I've inherited doesn't validate at all. It has lots of pages that
I can now revalidate all at once after each deployment.

So indeed, the list is the main feature which distuingishes it from using the
w3 validators directly. I'm considering more features, but I'm still thinking
them through.

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ken
Not a bad idea, but it doesn't seem to work with XHTML which is served
according to spec. I've got a site that's valid XHTML, which is served up as
application/xhtml+xml, which works fine in Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera (and
not at all in IE but I don't care), and it validates fine by validator.w3.org.

vldtr says "2 errors", and if I click the "W3C" logo next to it there, it
sends me to the W3C's "Feed Validation Service", which rightfully complains
that "It looks like this is a web page, not a feed".

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jeroen
A bug in my code to determine the type of content. It should work now. Thanks
for reporting!

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rwolf
With NoScript, I had to allow kruisit.nl before <http://vldtr.com/?key=HN>
would do anything besides list the urls. It's not a big problem (just makes me
a little nervous), but since you seem to control both servers you might want
to move whatever is getting called from kruisit.nl over to vldtr.com.

~~~
jeroen
Thanks. It was jquery, and I've moved it.

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jeroen
For a quick look at results: <http://vldtr.com/?key=HN>

~~~
bct
It looks like you're making requests directly to the online validators (this
is a guess based on how slow it is). Why not just run a local copy? The source
for the HTML validator is available, I would be surprised if the others were
not available too:
<[http://validator.w3.org/source/>](http://validator.w3.org/source/>);

~~~
jeroen
This project is only weeks old. I wanted to get it running asap. I'll take the
time to get the validators running locally soon.

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wlievens
This is awesome. This scratches an itch I always felt I had but never
consciously realized. The combination of saving your list, with the discover
feature. Good job.

Edit: also plus points for being dutch (I'm flemish).

