Re: Working Group Decision on ISSUE-31 / ISSUE-80 validation survey

Le 21 avr. 2011 à 21:59, John Foliot a écrit :
> "A terrifyingly small percentage of the pages on the web pass a validator. 
> The far vast majority of pages doesn't even nest their tags correctly. The 
> sad truth is that while we can do what you suggest, it's not going to have a 
> big effect because people simply doesn't consult validators to a large 
> degree."
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2011Mar/0627.html

There are two sides to this statement and both are difficult to assess. As a fact, when doing survey of the web accessible to crawler, we notice indeed a vast among of Web pages are not valid. 

1. These data can vary according to the validators (software bugs) of the moment and markup versions. (doctype, http issues, etc)
   http://www.w3.org/QA/2007/02/bugs_and_qa
   http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/09/top-500-html5-validity

2. We have no way to evaluate if it's improving or not. Many Web pages do not have proper creation dates for their URIs or right caching information. In a perfect world, we would be able to say, in the past 90% of the new pages were invalid and now 20% of the *newly created* pages are invalid. [FAKE STATS].
Create a mod_tidy for Apache and the validity suddenly raises.

All of that to say it is not necessary a good metric, even less so for accessibility.




> As an invested participant, I am now hearing conflicting commentaries from 
> others involved in the discussion, so it would be useful if we all knew what 
> the real status is/was: validation *does* matter, or *doesn't* matter. I 
> pose this question to the larger Working Group as well.

Validation *does matter* as a tool for helping you to author code and keep a certain level of quality. It doesn't matter that much when it comes to consume HTML.

Validation doesn't serve any purpose when it is not part of the CMS as a *immediate* feedback loop. Most of the (professional) Web agencies deliver valid Web sites, but without quality assurance systems. And after a few months, the Web site becomes invalid.
http://www.w3.org/QA/2006/01/failed_commitments
http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/09/Step-by-step

-- 
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations & Tools, Opera Software

Received on Tuesday, 26 April 2011 20:30:26 UTC