HTML::Validator
			--------------

INTRODUCTION:

HTML::Validator is a perl module which can be used to check if the HTML file
conforms to the W3C standards. The checking is done with nsgmls (a SGML
syntax validator) and document type definition files. Neither of these are
distributed with HTML-Validator. Instructions about how to obtain these
is provided below.

HTML::Validator is based on a validator script I wrote in 1997-1998
<URL:http://www.iki.fi/si/kameli/>. Even though the principles of operation 
(nsgmls, LWP) are identical to those of some validator engines on the web 
<URL:http://validator.w3c.org/>, HTML::Validator uses none of their code.

XML files are also validated; for this the nsgmls version needs to be 1.3
or greater.

REQUIREMENTS

 - perl (obviously)

 - LWP version 5.36 or greater

 - nsgmls 

	- http://www.jclark.com/sp/howtoget.htm

 - document type definition files

	- you can use W3C's sgml library files that are
	  found from <URL:http://validator.w3.org/sgml-lib.tar.gz>
        - for XHTML the document type files can be downloaded from
          http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html-in-xml/WD-html-in-xml.zip

INSTALLATION

First, you will have to type 

  ./configure

This will hopefully locate the perl and nsgmls binaries and generate the
Makefile. As this is a configure generated by the GNU autoconf, it accepts
all the default options in addition to these: 

--with-nsgmls=PATH 

     Use the nsgmls executable found in PATH

     The default value for this is /usr/bin/nsgmls

--with-dtd=PATH 

     Specify the directory where the doctype definitions are found. Note that
     a file called 'catalog' is expected to be found from this directory. 

     By default HTML::Validator expects the dtd files to be found from
     /usr/local/lib/sgml-lib/.     

--with-xml=PATH 

     Specify the directory where the doctype definitions are found. Note that
     a file called 'xhtml.soc' is expected to be found from this directory. 

     By default HTML::Validator expects the dtd files to be found from
     /usr/local/lib/WD-html-in-xml/DTD/.     

Writing these will do the rest:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

To install the module in a non-standard location you can use

   perl Makefile.PL LIB=~/lib


The Makefile is written with ExtUtils::MakeMaker, so it supports all the 
other standard options. See the manual page of that module for more
information.


VALIDATION

A sample validator script 'validate' is included with this package.


DOCUMENTATION

Documentation is provided with a manual page, which is automatically
generated by the information contained in the module itself.
The most up-to-date documentation will be found from the home page,
which is located at <URL:http://www.iki.fi/si/HTML-Validator/>.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks go to Heikki Kantola <hezu@iki.fi>, for his help in the early testing
phases and his excellent knowledge about HTML standards.


AVAILABILITY

The latest version of HTML::Validator can be found from 
http://www.iki.fi/si/HTML-Validator/
It is also available from CPAN <URL:http://www.perl.com/CPAN/>.


COPYRIGHT

HTML::Validator is © 1997-1999 Sami Itkonen <si@iki.fi>

HTML::Validator is distributed under the GNU General Public License.