Re: Requirements for research (Was: Dropping <input usemap="">)

On Aug 16, 2007, at 8:31 AM, James Graham wrote:

>
>> On 16 Aug 2007, at 04:40, Robert Burns wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>  From a scientific perspective, saying I searched a
>>> cache that I have, that you can't search and I won't even show  
>>> you the code that produces that cache , would be the same as me  
>>> saying the following. "I have this 8-ball and when I ask it if we  
>>> should drop @usamap from |input| it tells me 'not likely'. You  
>>> may say that sure, 8-balls say that But the odd part is that it  
>>> says that every time [cue eerie music]." :-) The point though is  
>>> that it can't be reproducible at all if its all based on hidden  
>>> data and methods.
>
> It's neither based on hidden data nor a hidden method. The data is  
> all publicly accessible webpages. The methodology is a) spider the  
> webpages, b) run the parsing algorithms in the html 5 spec over the  
> resulting files c) extract whatever data is of interest. That seems  
> in-principle pretty straight forward to me and at-least as  
> reproducible as many peer reviewed scientific studies. Indeed  
> Phillip Taylor has already managed to reproduce the procedure on a  
> smaller dataset and thus independently verified many of Hixie's  
> results.

Which results are you referring to here. Ian looked for misused  
<input usemap> elements. Philip looked for <blink> and <element-I  
just-mad-up> on another data set.  The couldn't reproduce the same  
results because they were looking for different things.

Take care,
Rob

Received on Thursday, 16 August 2007 13:46:11 UTC