Documentation of the SOAP 1.2 Web Service Interface for The W3C Feed Validation Service

Feed Validator Web Service API

The W3C Feed Validator exposes its Web service as a SOAP 1.2 interface, which you can use in your own applications.

Terms of Use
Validation Request Format
SOAP format description
Code Libraries

Terms of Use

When processing batch of documents, You MUST wait at least 1 second between each request.
Authentification for W3C Markup Validation service is NOT REQUIRED.

Validation Request Format

Below is a table of the parameter you can use to send a query to the W3C Feed Validator.

If you want to use W3c's public validation server, use the parameters below in conjunction with the following base URI:
http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi .

Note

replace with the address of your own server if you want to call a private instance of the validator
The Web Service can not be used on the feedvalidator.org service

Note: If you wish to call the validator programmatically for a batch of documents, please make sure that your script will sleep for at least 1 second between requests. The Feed Validation service is a free, public service for all, your respect is appreciated. thanks.

Parameter	Description	Default value
url	The URL of the document to validate	None, but either this parameter, or `uploaded_file`, or `fragment` must be given.
rawdata	The source of the document to validate. Full documents only. At the moment, will only work if data is sent with the UTF-8 encoding.	None, but either this parameter, or `uri` must be given. You should also set parameter `manual` to 1 to use direct input validation.
output	triggers the various outputs formats of the validator. If unset, the usual Web format will be sent. If set to `soap12`, the SOAP1.2 interface will be triggered. See below for the SOAP 1.2 response format description.	unset

SOAP format description

When called with parameter output=soap12, the validator will switch to its SOAP 1.2 interface (experimental for now). Below is a sample response, as well as a description of the most important elements of the response.

sample SOAP 1.2 validation response

IMPORTANT: this output is still new, and may be changed in the future. Should this happen, this documentation will be updated and the changes listed below.

A SOAP response for the validation of a document (invalid) will look like this:

 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<env:Envelope xmlns:env="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope">
<env:Body>
<m:feedvalidationresponse 
  env:encodingStyle="http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-encoding" 
  xmlns:m="http://www.w3.org/2005/10/feed-validator">
      <m:uri>http://www.w3.org/QA/news.rss</m:uri> 
      <m:checkedby>http://qa-dev.w3.org/feed/check.cgi</m:checkedby>
      <m:date>2005-11-11T11:48:24.491627</m:date>
      <m:validity>false</m:validity>
  <m:errors>
    <m:errorcount>2</m:errorcount>
      <m:errorlist>
        <error>
          <level>error</level>
          <type>MissingDescription</type>
          <line>23</line>
          <column>0</column>
          <text>Missing channel element: description</text>
          <msgcount>1</msgcount>
          <backupcolumn>0</backupcolumn>
          <backupline>23</backupline>
          <element>description</element>
          <parent>channel</parent>
        </error>
      </m:errorlist>
  </m:errors>
  <m:warnings>
      <m:warningcount>0</m:warningcount>
	  <m:warninglist></m:warninglist>
  </m:warnings>
  <m:informations>
	<m:infocount>0</m:infocount>
	<m:infolist></m:infolist>
  </m:informations>
</m:feedvalidationresponse>
</env:Body>
</env:Envelope>

SOAP1.2 response format reference

element	description
markupvalidationresponse	The main element of the validation response. Encloses all other information about the validation results.
uri	the address of the document validated. Will (likely?) be `upload://Form Submission` if an uploaded document or fragment was validated. In EARL terms, this is the `TestSubject`.
checkedby	Location of the service which provided the validation result. In EARL terms, this is the `Assertor`.
doctype	Detected (or forced) Document Type for the validated document
charset	Detected (or forced) Character Encoding for the validated document
validity	Whether or not the document validated passed or not formal validation
errors	Encapsulates all data about errors encountered through the validation process
errorcount	a child of errors, counts the number of errors listed
errorlist	a child of errors, contains the list of errors (surprise!)
error	a child of errorlist, contains the information on a single validation error.

Note: warnings, warningcount, warninglist and warning, as well as informations, infocount, infolist and info are similar to, respectively, errors, errorcount, errorlist and error.

SOAP1.2 atomic message (error or warning) format reference

As seen as the example above, the children of the error element, but also the warning element are line, col and message, defined below:

element	description
line	Within the source code of the validated document, refers to the line where the error was detected.
col	Within the source code of the validated document, refers to the line where the column was detected.
text	The actual error/warning/info message
msgcount	How many times this message was encountered
element	element in the feed where the message was triggered
parent	In the feed, parent of the `element`
value	if applicable the value of the element, attribute or content which triggered the message

Code Libraries

Another way to access this Web Service is through code libraries. At this moment, there are already two libraries created to access this service:

in perl: WebService::Validator::Feed::W3C,
in ruby: FeedValidator for Ruby and Rails

If you have built a library for another language, send a message to the www-validator public mailing-list, and we will add it to the list here.

Feed Validation Service