Integrating with Other Applications

To use the command line program within other applications, there are two "modes" of operation. The first is to simply run the check program with whatever arguments you require. This works fine, but involves a lot of Perl compilation and subsequent reading of configuration files, so is quite slow and resource hungry.

Alternatively, specify a dash ("-") as the file to validate and check will drop into a sort-of interactive mode. Here you can just enter the same arguments as you would have done on the command line; check will operate the same way, but only compiles the perl and reads configuration once.

For more information, see the usage notes.

For more elaborate integration, one might want to have links to documentation about the HTML standards (so that a user could look up an error message, for example). This isn't immediately easy with the command line program, but can be achieved in a number of ways. Most probably, the output of the check program could be "interpreted"; each error message is then looked up in a database and the location of the documentation is found. This would require knowledge of all possible error and warning messages though (which I don't have ;-)