- From: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 08:45:55 -0500
- To: James Graham <jg307@cam.ac.uk>
- Cc: Geoffrey Sneddon <foolistbar@googlemail.com>, public-html@w3.org
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