Cloaking and honest validation

W3C Validator Team,

In developing websites for our clients we frequently battle with browser
differences. Although we are writing valid XHTML, we user server side
browser detection to return slightly different pages to very old
browsers. (Browsers that don't fully support CSS or self-closed br tags,
for example.) Although both versions of our pages are valid XHTML the
link "http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=referer" is only capable of
validating the default version. 

We're looking for a way to provide honest validation of the page being
viewed. One option is that we can add a GET parameter to our page that
forces the server to display a particular version and then pass that URI
to the validator. But it would be nice, and perhaps more accurate, to
bounce the requester's actual user agent to make sure that the page
being viewed is actually being validated. This obviously wouldn't help
with IP based cloaking, but the legitimate reasons for using that are
minimal anyway.

Thank you for your hard work and attention to detail,


Geoffrey Oxholm

Oazao, Inc.

http://www.oazao.com/index.php

Received on Monday, 7 February 2005 23:24:03 UTC