[Zope-dev] Adding W3C validating to zope.testbrowser

[Ross Patterson]

I started a branch for doing W3C HTML validation on responses to
zope.testbrowser requests:

svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zope.testbrowser/branches/rossp-validator

The idea is to be able to flip a switch and run all my functional
zope.testbrowser tests and see validation failures as test failures.
The current implementation in that branch just uses a simple environment
variable since I wasn't sure what the best way was to support flipping a
switch like that.  Note that it's possible to use a local installation
of the W3C validator (such as is available on Debian based systems in
the w3c-markup-validator package) so that the validation doesn't
actually slow tests down all that much.

I have a couple of questions I'd like to hear any thoughts on.

What's the best way to support "flipping the switch" in a global sense
so that during the inner testing loop extra time isn't being wasted on
repeated validations?

Does this belong in zope.testbrowser or in the underlying mechanize
package?

Other than that, what's the path forward to merging?

Ross