How to install the Mobile Web Best Practices checker

The Mobile Web Best Practices checker is composed of a set python modules, available in the W3C public CVS Repository.

This page documents what modules are needed beyond these modules and a working Python 2.3 installation.

Modules needed

• htmltmpl (Debian: python-htmltmpl)
• Python Tidy wrapper (Debian: python-utidylib)

Non-debian packaged modules needed

• httplib2 version > .0.2.0
• swap (or at least the uripath module in it
• gnosis

Other resources needed

To avoid downloading DTD from the W3C server (and although they would be cached), the checker uses the catalog of pre-defined DTDs made available in the Markup Validator: it needs to be checked out from CVS and copied into /usr/local/share/sgml-lib/ (or configured adequately in validity.py).

Configuration

• the xmlproc has a bug that affects XML Well-formedness checking; you should apply the suggested fix
• set the sys.setdefaultencoding of python to utf-8; in debian, this is done by editing /etc/python2.X/site.py (NB: this affects all your running python code; there must be a better solution, but I'm not sure what it is)
• the checker uses an HTTP cache set by default to /tmp/httplib2-cache which needs to be writable by the script
• the templates directory needs also write-access