RE: survey of top web sites

On Thu 4/26/2007 1:37 PM Sean Fraser wrote:

>The survey I propose would - simply - have Pass/Fail criteria; HTML5 would include error numbers and >issues.

The reasons I joined the ongoing discussion of methodology here a few notes back (http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2007Apr/1453.html) may stem from my  misunderstanding about why we are surveying the top 200 web sites to begin with. The first reference to it I can see appears on DanC's agenda (http://www.w3.org/html/wg/il16) as 
 
"One idea from a chat with Chris W. is to survey the top 200 web sites regularly."
 
listed under Proposed Design Principles. I had perhaps mistakenly assumed that the reason we were concerned about methodology here was in relation to the quesiton of 
 
"how much web will break if we move to a new spec?" -- If that is the case, than determining what proportion of top 200 sites validate according to HTML4 and CSS2 specs is not so important, and other methodologies including which sites are sampled become important for the sake of generalizability from sample to population. That's what I was trying to chime in about.
 
Instead it is possible that we are discussing this survey in relationship to the "candidate requirement: market threshold". That's a subject I do not understand well enough to have an opinion about.
 
Some of the discussion here has made me think I must have misunderstood what we are talking about. Apologies if so.
 
David
 
 
 

Received on Thursday, 26 April 2007 20:12:07 UTC