Re: HTML5 Authoring Conformance Study

Consolidating replies...

On Mar 21, 2010, at 6:36 AM, Shelley Powers wrote:

> 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?

I think those are good questions. I am personally more interested in  
asking them about specific requirements than in general form. It  
seemed like Aryeh at least felt that there may be good reasons for  
conformance requirements besides interoperability, namely helping the  
author by spotting likely mistakes, and user vigilance for such issues  
as nonstandard behavior.


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

Note that if we remove all authoring conformance requirements, as Sam  
suggested would be an acceptable solution, that would include removing  
alt requirements too. It also seems to me that the alt requirement  
does not meet Sam's standard of affecting interoperability, though  
violating it will likely result in a document that is broken for some  
audiences.


On Mar 21, 2010, at 6:47 AM, Shelley Powers wrote:

> And you missed a reasonably popular site, Maciej:
>
> http://validator.nu/?doc=http://store.apple.com/us

http://www.apple.com/ is included. However, I did not include any deep  
URLs (including subdomains) in the study. We could include selected  
deep pages if that would be more informative, but I'm not sure I can  
do much more than the current list without more help.

Two other notes:

1) That page gets a significantly fewer errors when validated as HTML5:

http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fstore.apple.com%2Fus&schema=http%3A%2F%2Fs.validator.nu%2Fhtml5%2Fhtml5full.rnc+http%3A%2F%2Fs.validator.nu%2Fhtml5%2Fassertions.sch+http%3A%2F%2Fc.validator.nu%2Fall%2F&parser=html5

2) http://www.apple.com/ also fail to validate, though no one has  
broken down its errors in detail yet.

Regards,
Maciej