Scott Andrew - lo-fi acoustic pop superhero!

The new beta W3 validator — the more I play with it, the more I wish it provided a SOAP or XML-RPC interface. How cool would it be to have HTML and CSS validation tools built into Blogger and Movable Type? Or a Mozilla extension/IE add-in that validates the page you’re viewing and warns you of errors that might affect your experience? See, that’s the problem with web service APIs: eventually, you’ll want one for everything.

Update: Tom Gilder points out that the new validator provides an (undocumented?) XML output option, and Simon Willison creates a proof-of-concept XML-RPC proxy for the service. This was probably all finished before I got up this morning. Bootstrapping at its finest.

Update #2: Heh, looks like the W3C has noticed that we’ve discovered the XML output. This message is now appended to each validation report:

This interface is highly experimental and the output *will* change -- probably even several times -- before finished. Do *not* rely on it!

Please respect their wishes and don’t abuse this feature.