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WPSS Validation Tool User Guide

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_Don edited this page Jan 16, 2014 · 15 revisions

Version 4.0 January 8, 2014

Contents

Contents Introduction Tool Limitations Tool Risks What’s New Installation System Requirements Remove Existing .pl File Associations Installing the WPSS Tool Uninstall Uninstalling Perl Uninstalling Python Using the WPSS Validation Tool Site Details Tab Entering URLs Saving Site Details Loading Site Details Login/Logout Tab Login/Logout URLs Crawling a Site and Analysing Documents Direct HTML Input Tab URL List Tab Configuration Tab Results Window Saving Analysis Results Stopping Crawler and Analysis Application Login Web Server Protected Sites Reporting Passes and Fails Capture HTML Content on Errors Command Line Interface Crawl a Site Crawl a site with a login Analyse a block of HTML code Analyse a list of URLs Program Status and Progress Viewing Results Language Switching Configuration Files Domain Network Scope Domain Alias Map Troubleshooting Entry Page Rewritten Forbidden by robots.txt User Agent String Perl Command Line Interpreter Error 500 Internal Server Error

Introduction

The PWGSC WPSS Validation Tool provides web developers and quality assurance testers the ability to perform a number of web site and web page validation tasks at one time. The WPSS Validation Tool crawls a site to find all of the documents, then analyses each one with a number of validation tools. The analysis includes:

  • HTML validation,
  • CSS validation,
  • robots.txt validation,
  • link violation checking,
  • metadata checking,
  • Technical Quality Assurance (TQA) checking,
  • HTML document feature reporting, for example, forms,
  • Open Data checking using a separate application tool.

Details of these analysis tools are available in the document, Web-WPSS Standalone Validation Tool Testcases.

Tool Limitations

There are limitations within the tool that may affect the validation results.

  • The tools do not support JavaScript. The Validation Tool may not accurately crawl or analyse sites that rely on JavaScript.
  • The tools do not use a standard Web browser User Agent name. The Validation Tool may not accurately crawl or analyse sites that rely on the User Agent name.
  • The tools’ default behaviour is to respect robots directives. If a site has a robots.txt to prohibit crawlers, the WPSS Validation Tool will not validate the site’s documents. You can configure the WPSS Validation Tool to ignore robots.txt directives. For more information, see the section, “Configuration Tab”.
  • Some of the output of the individual Validation Tools may be in English only. This tool is using third party software components. The source of these components is available only in the language that it was authored.

Tool Risks

The validation tool includes a crawler that follows links and retrieves web documents from sites. Care should be taken with this tool to:

  • Ensure entry page URLs for the sites are accurate so the crawler does not go beyond the site being analysed.
  • Ensure that document retrieval from the site being analysed, and any links to other sites, do not impose excessive loads on web servers and the network.

What’s New

Version 4.0 includes a number of enhancements. These include:

  • An Open Data tool is now included to check dataset, resource and dictionary files for compliance. For information on using the Open Data Tool, see the Open Data Tool User Guide.
  • Case insensitive checks on titles to find matching HTML and PDF versions of a document.
  • Allows binary data in CSV files. For example, new-line in cell content.
  • Report interoperability failure for web feeds that do not parse properly. (SWI_B)
  • Check for table headers that reference undefined headers or headers outside the current table (WCAG_2.0-H43)
  • Check for all language markers to determine if a page is archived or not. It also handles the case where the wrong language message is used.
  • Encode text that is written to results tabs, eliminating garbled French characters.
  • Check that Python version is not 3.0 or greater. The feed validator does not work with Python version 3.0.
  • Report unknown mime-type documents as non-HTML primary format.
  • Accept the enter key in the URL List tab to move to the next input line.
  • Added additional French archived web page notice.
  • Check for very long, over 500 character, title and heading text (WCAG_2.0-H25, WCAG_2.0-H42).
  • Do not report zoom failures for fixed size fonts (WCAG_2.0-G142).

Installation

The WPSS Validation Tool requires a Perl distribution installed on the workstation, and.pl files are associated with the Perl interpreter. The WPSS Validation Tool has been tested with Strawberry Perl 5.18.1 and ActivePerl version 5.14. Other versions of Strawberry Perl or ActivePerl and other Perl installations may not work as expected or may be missing required modules.

System Requirements

To use the WPSS Validation Tool, you need:

  • Windows XP or Windows 7,
  • Java runtime environment 1.6.0 (other versions may not work),
  • Python version 2.7.3 or 2.7.6,
  • Strawberry Perl 5.18.1 (32 bit) or ActiveState Perl 5.14 (does not support 5.16),
  • Only one installation of Perl on the system. Multiple installations may cause problems.

If you do not have the Perl or Python, you will need to install them manually. You can find installations at:

For the Perl and Python installs, accept the default settings during the installation process.

Remove Existing .pl File Associations

Before installing the WPSS Tool, remove any existing .pl file type associations. The installation of Strawberry Perl or ActivePerl will create a new association to ensure the proper execution of Perl applications.

To remove the .pl file association:

  1. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel.
  2. Click Folder Options.
  3. Click the File Types tab.
  4. In the Registered file types list, locate and click the .pl entry.
  5. Click Delete.
  6. Click OK.

Installing the WPSS Tool.

To install the WPSS Validation Tool, double-click the WPSS_Install.exe file and follow the instructions on the screen.

WPSS Validation Tool Install Icon

The default installation folder for the WPSS Validation Tool is C:\Program Files\WPSS_Tool.

Uninstall

To remove the WPSS Validation Tool from a workstation, run the uninstall script.

To uninstall the WPSS Validation Tool:

Go to Start > Programs > WPSS_Tool > Uninstall.

Uninstall path

Uninstalling Perl

To remove the Perl installation:

  1. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel.
  2. Click Add or Remove Programs.
  3. Locate the Strawberry or ActivePerl installation and click Remove.

Uninstalling Python

To remove the Python installation:

  1. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel.
  2. Click Add or Remove Programs.
  3. Locate the Python installation and click Remove.
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