[MacPerl] macweblint 1.020.1

[Heath Tanner <heatht@interport.net>]

Though I've dabbled with Perl in website development and have had a copy of
MacPerl on my hard drive for years, it wasn't until recently that I
actually started playing around with it. I wish I hadn't waited so long.
I'm very impressed with MacPerl.

I'm particularly pleased how portable many Perl scripts are. I expected
much more difficulty than I encountered in  porting scripts from unix and
adapting them to work as droplets. For many scripts, all that's needed is
to convert the linefeeds from unix to mac and then save the script as a
droplet. What a pleasure.

When I discovered how easy it is to port scripts, I was surprised no one
had ported the latest stable version of weblint (<http://www.weblint.org>)
to the Mac. I guess not many people check their HTML, and weblint 1.020 is
somewhat dated, restricted to HTML 3.2. Nonetheless, for the vast majority
of the pages I've worked on, weblint is still a very useful tool.

So, as my first MacPerl project, I've ported weblint 1.020 to macweblint
1.020.1.

You can download macweblint at:
<http://www.inligo.com/macperl/macweblint.html>.

For the most part, this port is true to the original.

The only significant difference is a new (default) warning style: "mac".  A
fundamental rule of user interface is that anything which doesn't occur
immediately should provide feedback about its progress, so I've made
macweblint report its progress for each page, regardless of whether it
finds any errors. Users who prefer the traditional style reporting can set
the warning style to "lint" in the configuration file.

For a related project, integrating macweblint with Userland's Frontier
(<http://frontier.userland.com>), I'm also trying to call macweblint
through apple events by embedding the script in an Applescript.

Though I can get this method to work for other scripts, I can't get it to
work with macweblint. Though it is actually successful in calling the
script at times, it always receives an error in reply. I can compile the
script embedded in Applescript, but I can't call it without an error.
BBEdit (with the MacPerl plug-ins), however, *can* run macweblint through
apple events.

Are there any issues I should be aware of? Does anyone know what I can't
call this script embedded in Applescript? Any assistance would be greatly
appreciated.

Well, since this is my first contribution to the MacPerl community, I'll
refrain myself from rambling on. I hope at least a few of you try
macweblint and let me know what you think.


Heath Tanner
<http://www.inligo.com>







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