Article Validators

Validators are used to check article content against published accessibility guidelines.

The article validator home page lists any existing validators. As standard these are: two variants of the W3C Validator, an accessibility checker (AChecker), and a readability tester from Online-Utility.

Right-click a validator to view, edit, delete or copy it.

Validation services that require cookie handling by the browser cannot currently be used. Services cannot interact with iCM (eg automatically correct the data) because they must be able to 'see' iCM, which is usually not possible, or desirable, for security reasons.

Create an Article Validator

From the actions panel, select "Create an article validator".  

The "Test these validator settings" command in the action panel can be used to test the validator before saving. It will display a message if there are any problems with the validator at the top of a pop-up window. 

Name

The name of validator that will be displayed in iCM. 

URL

The full URL of the validator resource including the protocol, for example http://validator.w3.org/check.  

This must be the URL of the page to which the article data is submitted (taken from the validators form's action attribute).

Parameters

The parameters list identifies the information that will be sent to the specified URL when the validator is used.  These consist of name-value pairs corresponding to the form fields to be submitted to the validation service, together with a description that may be used to describe the purpose of the data and possible alternative values to those specified. 

Use the "Create", "Edit" and "Delete" buttons to add, modify and remove parameters.  

Default Validator

If you check the "Default Validator" box, all articles in all subsites will automatically be sent for validation whenever they are submitted. Any number of validators may be configured as default validators, but be aware that this will affect the length of time it takes to submit an article. 

Rather than setting them globally, default validators can also be set on a per subsite or per template basis. Should no default validators be set they can still be used manually while editing an article. Articles that fail validation will not be able to be submitted.

What to Validate

This section defines the information that will be sent to the validator for analysis. 

"The complete rendered article" option will pass a full preview of the article to the validator, including page elements not in the control of the article editor.

The "Just the article heading, introduction and body text fields" option will pass just the contents of these article fields to the validator. This is generally the preferred option as it allows the iCM user to validate their own content and not be presented with errors that are beyond their control.

Search Expression

When a default validator is executed as part of an article template requirements check, this "Search expression" is applied to the report returned by the validator in order to determine whether the validator checks either passed or failed. The expression may be a text string to look for, but can also be a JavaScript regular expression that can be used for more sophisticated searching.

Finding the Search Expression Means

The search expression applied to the validation report may be configured to look either for evidence that the checks were passed or that they failed. The options here identify the sense of the expression: selecting the "Pass" option means that if the search expression matches the content of the validation report, then the validation is deemed to have succeeded.  Conversely, if the "Fail" option is selected, a match on the search expression will be deemed to represent a validation failure. 

Pass Message

The message displayed in the article requirements checker if the validation checks have succeeded. 

Fail Message

The message displayed in the article requirements checker if the validation checks have failed.