Re: Validator suggestion

On Thu, 15 Feb 2001, Arveson, Paul wrote:

> Suggestion: Please provide a count of the total number
> of errors on the page, so we don't have to count them
> manually.

The actual number of errors is at best questionable as a measure of
quality (particularly when some pages lack a doctype declaration:
these should strictly be validated as HTML 2.0, but none of the
validators actually do that.

A more useful exercise is to see what DTDs you can validate against.
There's little merit now to the old "tag soup" DTDs (HTML 3.2, 4.0
Transitional or XHTML 1.0 Transitional), so Strict should be a
reasonable baseline.  If you are interested in higher standards
(e.g. to ensure you meet your obligations under disability
discrimination legislation) or lower standards (e.g. to accommodate
selected authoring and publishing tools), then validate *also*
to a custom DTD.

To expand a little on this line of argument (and my approach to a
similar problem to yours), see the live demo at
<URL:http://valet.webthing.com/intranet/report-form.html>
and the pages it references (Page Valet and WDG DTD).

-- 
Nick Kew

Received on Sunday, 18 February 2001 08:29:50 UTC