W3C Markup Validator Roadmap

This page holds the development roadmap for the W3C Markup Validation Service.

Past Releases Roadmap

Versions Prior to 0.6.0
Versioning up to version 0.5.x was only done as a development mechanism, and the validator was not following a strict release cycle.
0.6.x
The 0.6.0 release, in 2002, kicked in a new phase of open source development for the validator, including a number of bug fixes. 0.6.0 through 0.6.7 included mostly bug fixes and documentation updates.
0.7.x
The 0.7.0 release reorganized the validator to use templates, making it easier to produce different outputs (hence the development of an API). 0.7.0 through 0.7.4 included mostly bug fixes and documentation updates.
0.8.x
The 0.8.0 release sees the validator code reorganized around a more modular architecture, adding better XML checking capabilities.

Future Roadmap

0.9.x
The next big version of the validator should be about localization. Provide at least all the error messages to users in their languages, and if possible, UI and documentation as well. Other things that could make it to 0.9.x:
  • Start caching validation results locally and doing an If-Modified-Since HTTP request to only download and revalidate URLs if they actually changed since their last validation
  • Site walker/validator: need to add a "registered user" feature first, because this feature could be abused (many requests on a server in a short period of time)?
  • URL-minder service: "remind me if this page or set of pages ever ceases to validate".
1.0
This is often seen as "blue sky". This version should build upon a modular structure, and be able to use different parsers as alternates or in sequence: support relaxNG, schematron, etc. Also, investigate checking of RDDL, microformats and other rich markup.

Miscellaneous things that should get into this roadmap