Assertions regarding the quality of HTML documents

On Mon, Aug 06, 2007 at 10:40:21AM +0200, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
> 
> Obviously I recognise a use for easy identification of quality. It's why The
> Web Repair Initiative aims to certify authoring tools:
> <http://webrepair.org/strategy/certification>. But I don't see how a mere
> string claiming quality, or lack thereof, could ever be useful -- it would be
> easy to be spoofed. The only way for it to have meaning would be if either it
> somehow can only be added to a document after the quality of the document has
> been established, which I don't see how to achieve, or if it would be
> verifiable.

It very much depends on whether the reader of the assertion regards whoever
made the assertion as reliable in assessing the quality of the document.

This is why more sophisticated languages for asserting the results of
evaluations identify who is making the claim, and specify more precisely the
criteria which are asserted to have been satisfied.

See http://www.w3.org/TR/EARL10/ for a language that formalizes such quality
claims.  EARL 1.0 has been implemented in evaluation tools.

It would be better to leave the task of making quality claims to specialized
languages such as this, than to introduce an inherently less expressive
mechanism into HTML, whether via the META element or otherwise.

Received on Monday, 6 August 2007 09:33:16 UTC