Ultraviolet (Light My Way)
Posted on 28th February 2011
Last week I gave my first technical talk for several months. Despite being a bit rusty, everyone seemed to find the talk interesting. The talk itself was about code I'd written to test XHTML completeness of web pages and further pattern matching of page content. I've been using and developing the testing code over the last few years, having written the initial basic script, xhtml-valid, back in 2008. Over the last 18 months I have revisited the code and rewritten it into a traditional Perl testing structure. The talk looked at the current state of the code and asked for advice on where to take it next.
The code has developed into two packages, Test::XHTML and Test::XHTML::Valid, and as such the talk naturally fell into two parts, looking at each package in more depth. I had originally planned a demo, but unfortunately my laptop wouldn't talk to the projector, so had to rely on slides alone. This didn't seem to matter too much, as the slides conveyed enough of the API to give a decent flavour of what the packages were about.
The final questions I asked originally centred on where I was thinking of heading with the code base, but I also got asked a few questions regarding the technical aspects. My thanks to Colin Newell and Nick Morrott for giving me some ideas and pointers for further expansion of the code. As for my final questions, it was generally agreed that these should appear on CPAN in some form, and as two separate packages, but unfortunately nobody had a suitable name for either.
I plan to work further on the code, both to package them better and to include the suggestions from Colin and Nick, and then I'll see if anyone has some better suggestions for the names. In the meantime, the slides are now online [1] and the 2008 version 1.00 of the code base is also available [2]. I aim to have the current code base online soon, with a GitHub repo to provide ongoing developments for anyone who might be interested.
[1] http://birmingham.pm.org/talks/barbie/text-xhtml
[2] http://barbie.missbarbell.co.uk/page/code
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