I’m currently working on the CSS portion of the First Phase, so I’ve been looking at getting the W3C CSS Validator running locally on my machine. Since there was a tiny bit more to it than there seemed from the W3C’s setup instructions, I thought I’d better write down how I did it.

1. Download the Jigsaw web server and unzip it to a location of your choice. We’ll be needing the servlet.jar file from it later (it’s in Jigsaw 2/classes/servlet.jar)

2. Open a terminal window, and change directory to somewhere you’re happy to put the CSS Validator. The CVS password, when prompted, is “anonymous”.

   CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@dev.w3.org:/sources/public cvs login
   CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@dev.w3.org:/sources/public cvs checkout \
   2002/css-validator
   cd 2002/css-validator
   mkdir lib
   cp {your servelet.jar location} lib
   ant jar
   

3. Assuming nothing goes wrong, you’ve got yourself a self-contained, offline CSS Validator. Awesome.

4. Test the validator by running the following:

   java -jar css-validator.jar --output=soap12 http://www.w3.org/
   

5. By running the following, you can see the options available to you from the validator:

   java -jar css-validator.jar
   

   These options are explained in the CSS Validator User Manual.

And that, as they say, is all there is to it. From this, it shouldn’t be too difficult to set the validator up to run as a website if you want to, but that wasn’t necessary for me right now, so I didn’t do it myself.