Talk:Validator.nu Web Service Interface

Implementation feedback

Just for fun I've added sort-of compatible interface to the hCard Validator.

My Suggestions:

id field for messages, that uniquely identifies each problem (e.g "unknown-attribute"). This may allow clients to ignore certain warnings and accurately aggregate error statistics even if error message contains variable data or simply wording changes.
if message contains variable data (e.g. "'div' not allowed in 'span'"), the data could be additionally given in a separate array (["div","span"]), to allow clients to localize messages using id + arguments.
combinations of error types and subtypes are weird. It could be orthogonal severity {fatal|error|warning|info} and type {document|i/o|unsupported}, this way you could e.g. warn about i/o problems (like downgrading of https to http).
message_html field to allow formatted messages (messages may contain code fragments, abbreviations or links and I'd like to display these nicely to the user)
field for additional, more verbose message or hint how to fix the problem (html formatted too)
field for url to the relevant part of the specification
possibility to specify non-line-oriented error location (in my implementation I don't track line numbers, but I could generate XPath path to the element)
parse tree might contain code property which is just an XML serialisation of DOM (this is good enough for spotting misinterpreted markup)
field or naming scheme for implementation-specific data?