I’m using the Validator quit a lot lately, for reasons which will become apparent soon enough.
In order to run the stand-alone validator on an OS X machine, just download from the link above, and install the app normally.
Open it up, and you’ve got a validator right there on your computer that works much faster than the online one, and it can also validate local files (as long as they’re straight HTML).
The other cool thing you can do, is set it up to respond to local requests via the Web Service API.
To do this, you just have to leverage the Apache already running on your machine by following the instructions right on the home page. The instructions for 10.5 worked in 10.6 for me:
# cd /Applications/Validator-SAC.app/Contents/Resources # sudo cp validator/httpd/conf/validator-SAC-10.5.conf /etc/apache2/other # sudo apachectl graceful
After that, a quick test using curl proves that the install is working:
# curl http://localhost/w3c-validator
And out comes the HTML for the validator homepage (which I’ve given up trying to get MarsEdit to allow me to show any of in this document).
At any rate, you can now use the validator right on your machine without hitting the net except for getting the page to validate.
Cool!