Re: HTML5 Authoring Conformance Study

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 2:20 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:

>
> I've decided that it's worthwhile to review the HTML5 conformance errors
> reported on notable sites in more details. I started the following wiki page
> to collect data:
>
> http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/HTML5_Authoring_Conformance_Study
>
> Thanks to Aryeh Gregor and myself, we now have a full classification of
> HTML5 conformance errors on the Alexa Top 10. Thanks also to Sam Ruby for
> his blog post that inspired the set of sites chosen and links to similar
> data in raw form. If anyone would like to help with gathering the data for
> the remaining sites, it would be much appreciated. The methodology is
> documented on the wiki page.
>
> Once the raw data is collected, I plan to write up a summary of which
> errors are common across many sites. For those that I conclude are more
> annoying than helpful, I will file bugs. I encourage others to file bugs on
> any requirements that they feel are wrong or insufficiently justified. So
> far the most common validation failures that seem clearly deliberate are
> unescaped &, and presentational markup.
>
> Note: this does not preclude anyone else from filing and pursuing omnibus
> bugs about authoring conformance in general. I am simply choosing to invest
> my personal energies in what I see as a more fruitful course of action.
>
> Regards,
> Maciej
>
>
>

Interesting reading the WhatWG IRC messages related to your effort. It would
seem that Aryeh Gregor also asked some of the similar questions Sam asked:
not what is a bug in the validator, or a specific misunderstanding, but why
is something non-conforming? What is the rationale behind the demand for
conformance?

It's just unfortunate that he picked on the alt attribute[1], which does
have a rationale for conformance.

Shelley

[1]  http://krijnhoetmer.nl/irc-logs/whatwg/20100321#l-337