The title element of the result page

The result page that the validator sends seems to have a fixed
title element,
<title>Validation Results</title>

This is rather paradoxical especially if you consider one of the "tips of
the day" (a misnomer, since it seems that the validator selects them at
random, not on a daily basis),
"<title>: the most important element of a quality Web page",
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/good-titles
which mentions, as the second item in the list, use in bookmark lists.
How useful it is for an author to bookmark a dozen or so validation
results, in order to use the bookmarks to validate again later,
if they are all named "Validation Results".

Suggestion: make the result page's title
Validation results of ... <...>
where the first ... is a copy of the validated page's title and the second
... is its URL.

This often makes the title fairly long, but there's no limit to title
length, and the recommendations on length relate to the possibility of various
truncations. Admittedly the page's title is often misleading or too
general, but it's up to authors to fix this, and when titles are used
well, they are useful in this context too.

As the second best option, make it just
Validation results of <...>
since this at least makes the various pages unique and gives information,
despite not being very readable.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Sunday, 4 April 2004 08:03:39 UTC