Question

I want to check internal web pages, so I cannot use the W3C validation service directly. I managed to run the XHTML validator locally, however, I have some problems with the css-validator. I do not really want to setup Tomcat or Jigsaw in order to be able to run Java servlet, and the commandline option gives me an error message

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: 
org.w3c.tools.resources.ProtocolException at 
org.w3c.css.css.CssValidator.main(CssValidator.java:164)

How can I validate local CSS on a Linux box?

Answer 1

You can invoke the W3C validator from the command line:

Command-Line use

Any computer with Java installed can
also run the validator from the
terminal/console as a commandline
tool. Download the css-validator.jar
jar archive (or build it with ant jar)
and run it as :

java -jar css-validator.jar http://www.w3.org/

Note : the css-validator.jar file must
be located at the exact same level as
the lib/ folder to work properly.

Update: To get it to work, I checked out the full distribution from CVS and ran ant using the included build.xml. It downloaded all dependencies except for servlet.jar. To deal with that, I downloaded the binary distribution of Tomcat 6 and extracted it. Then, I edited the build.xml for css-validator to reflect the location of servlet.lib:

<property name="servlet.lib" 
 value="E:/Downloads/apache-tomcat-6.0.20/lib/servlet-api.jar"/>

Then ran ant again. This produced the css-validator.jar file in the top level of the directory checked out from CVS with the lib subdirectory containing the other jars it depends on. Then, I was able to run the validator successfully:

C:\Temp\validator\2002\css-validator> java -jar css-validator.jar http://www.unur.com/