About QA-Dev
The goal of the Quality Assurance Activity at W3C is to improve the quality of W3C specifications and their implementation on the field. QA Tools Development (or, in short, "qa-dev") is one of the efforts launched by the activity in order to reach this global goal.
What we do
Development
Development of stable and experimental new tools and services is conducted by the qa-dev effort.
Maintenance
qa-dev maintains a number of tools and services. Some of them are being developed, while others are kept dormant and minimal maintenance is done by qa-dev.
Consulting
qa-dev offers advice and infrastructure to related W3C projects.
Current projects
Here is a limited list of projects maintained or developed by the qa-dev effort. This list does not include experimental un-released projects.
- Maintenance and development of the W3C Markup Validator
- Maintenance and development of the W3C CSS Validator
- Maintenance and development of the W3C Link Checker
- Development of the Log Validator
- Maintenance of the RDF Validation service
- Maintenance of an instance of the Feed Validation Service
Participate
There are many ways you can help in the maintenance, bug fixing, and development of the QA-dev suite of tools.
One is to send bug reports when you find one:
- Feedback for the CSS validator can done by sending mail to the www-validator-css mailing list
- Feedback for the Markup Validator, Link Checker and Log Validator can be done by sending mail to the www-validator mailing-list
If you want to participate in the development or coding, you can easily grab the code for all our tools and send us a patch. And from there on, if you want to join the developer's team for these tools, you are most welcome... The more, the merrier!
Available resources
on the Web
- the QA Toolbox is a catalog of available QA-related tools at W3C (maintained, or not by the QA-dev effort).
- We are maintaining an entry on the QA Wiki listing the current meeting schedule, open action items, and "hot" discussion topics.
Mailing-list
- public-qa-dev@w3.org is the publicly archived list of the qa-dev effort. The archive is available for everyone to consult, and anyone can subscribe, but please contact the coordinators if you wish to participate in the qa-dev effort.
Infrastructure
- validator.w3.org is the production server used by qa-dev to run their released services
- qa-dev also has a development (test) server, used by qa-dev projects and available for use by other (related) projects at W3C.
The qa-dev Team
Coordination by W3C Staff
The qa-dev effort is coordinated by Olivier Thereaux with support from other W3C staff.
Developers and Contributors
qa-dev development work is achieved by a team of volunteer, benevolent contributors. Past and present major contributors include:
- Terje Bless
- Nick Kew
- Ville Skyttä
- Björn Höhrmann
- Jim Ley
- ... And help from many other (see each project for full credits)