- From: Rob Sayre <rsayre@mozilla.com>
- Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:10:30 -0500
- To: Karl Dubost <karl+w3c@la-grange.net>
- CC: "John Foliot - WATS.ca" <foliot@wats.ca>, 'Geoffrey Sneddon' <foolistbar@googlemail.com>, 'HTML WG' <public-html@w3.org>, 'W3C WAI-XTECH' <wai-xtech@w3.org>
On 2/20/09 6:30 PM, Karl Dubost wrote: > > > Le 20 févr. 2009 à 18:09, Rob Sayre a écrit : >> The text above demonstrates a belief that the spec can force people >> to do things. I don't think it can. > > The spec can't force people to do things. It encourage people to do > things. Often more likely, validators encourage people to do things. > They even develop more confidence into the validators than the spec. > :) [this from years of participating to W3C validators community] I do agree that validators can encourage people to do things, or alert them to problems they weren't previously aware of. I'm curious how a validator would deal with the requirements in Ian's draft for the alt attribute. I also know of a very successful validator that manages to inform users of problems not quite covered by spec requirements. Here's an example: <http://feedvalidator.org/docs/warning/NotInline.html> So, while I agree that specs beget validators, I disagree that validators need RFC2119 imperatives to do their job in this case. >> I want the spec to accurately reflect reality, > > "Not working well at this point in the message…" I think I understand > your goal, but "reality" and "real world" should be banned from all > discussions we have about technologies. These expressions are a smoke > screen to the actual issues There are certainly W3C Working Groups that appear to have banned those terms. I don't think it is a good idea. <http://code.google.com/webstats/> Is a good survey. Looks like there are a lot of alt attributes out there. I wonder how many are empty, and how many are valid according to the requirements in Hixie's draft (difficult to measure!) - Rob
Received on Saturday, 21 February 2009 00:11:16 UTC