## W3C Markup Validator Roadmap

This page holds the development reoadmap for the W3C Markup Validation Service.

- For a list open bugs and detailed feature, we now use Bugzilla, which can be searched by specific milestone version numbers.
- This roadmap only gives a high-level overview of what each generation of the validator changed from the others. For a detailed list of features and changes in past releases, see the News page.
- If you would like to discuss this roadmap, or request new features, please join the www-validator mailing list.

### Past Releases Roadmap

Versions Prior to 0.6.0
  Versioning up to version 0.5.x was only done as a development mechanism, and the validator was not following a strict release cycle.
0.6.x
  The 0.6.0 release, in 2002, kicked in a new phase of open source development for the validator, including a number of bug fixes. 0.6.0 through 0.6.7 included mostly bug fixes and documentation updates.
0.7.x
  The 0.7.0 release reorganized the validator to use templates, making it easier to produce different outputs (hence the development of an API). 0.7.0 through 0.7.4 included mostly bug fixes and documentation updates.
0.8.x
  The 0.8.0 release sees the validator code reorganized around a more modular architecture, adding better XML checking capabilities.

### Future Roadmap

0.9.x
  The next big version of the validator should be about localization. Provide at least all the error messages to users in their languages, and if possible, UI and documentation as well. Other things that could make it to 0.9.x:
  - Start caching validation results locally and doing an `If-Modified-Since` HTTP request to only download and revalidate URLs if they actually changed since their last validation
  - Site walker/validator: need to add a "registered user" feature first, because this feature could be abused (many requests on a server in a short period of time)?
  - URL-minder service: "remind me if this page or set of pages ever ceases to validate".
1.0
  This is often seen as "blue sky". This version should build upon a modular structure, and be able to use different parsers as alternates or in sequence: support relaxNG, schematron, etc. Also, investigate checking of RDDL, microformats and other rich markup.

### Miscellaneous things that should get into this roadmap

- Add a section to the report on document cacheability? (or just link to it?)
- Make e.g. `http://validator.w3.org/check/referer;imgonly` return only an image showing the validation status of the referring page, or something similar with a landing page for referer validation, showcasing what validation/web conformance/standards are, with most of the gritty stuff hidden from view.
- Make an "elements found" section a la Webtechs, with links from each element to the appropriate place in either the DTD tree listing produced with dtd2html (after running dtd2html with all DTDs in the catalog), or the HTML 3.2/4.0 specs, or htmlhelp.com stuff, ...
- Add a "recommend a DTD for me" feature (check a document against all available DTDs, report which one has the fewest errors)