RE: Two Wishes for Bobby (or any accessibility checker)

> Two Wishes for Bobby (or any accessibility checker)
>
> 1. Condition Bobby approval on validation.
>    A document that is invalid should not
>    be accessibility-approved.

Bobby presently has a "trivial" validator which only looks at
element/attribute names, but not content model I think.

DC: The reason why Bobby is a "trivial" validator is because it never
claimed to be a validator, it is a browser compatibility checker, meaning it
only looks at at the tags, attributes, and values. It does no analysis at
the structural/syntax level.

It could reuse the W3C HTML validator at http://validator.w3.org,
either by downloading it (source is open) and running it local or by
calling it remotely thru the cgi syntax (we'd need to work together
some kind of stable output syntax for the validator, as it's now only
meant to be parsed by human).

Given the downloadable nature of Bobby, maybe integrating the W3C
validator locally is better (the drawback being that everytime the
validator is updated, Bobby needs to update its bits).

> 2. Spell check. (This now in the guidelines)
>  Bobby can spellcheck documents (this will make it more
>  popular, and compensate for the loss of users due to
>  validation requirements)

That's a tough one, spell checking in an international environment
(the web) is already hard, but an international techie one is really
tricky.

DC: Good point. Also, to my knowledge, there are few (if any) spell checkers
in the public domain.

David Clark
CAST, Inc.

Received on Thursday, 17 December 1998 11:19:35 UTC