Re: Audience Based Validator User Interface (ISSUE-206)

On Sat, Aug 4, 2012 at 10:55 PM, Laura Carlson
<laura.lee.carlson@gmail.com> wrote:
> The crux of the matter has always been that two validator user groups
> 1.) authors  2.) engineers of large web applications have different
> goals.

That's not the crux of the matter. The crux of the matter is that some
markup generator developers expect some people who evaluate the
quality of their generator to throw the output of the generator at a
validator and judge the generator negatively if the validator
complains. Therefore, these markup generator developers make the
output of their generators such that the validator won't complain
*when invoked the way the markup generator developers expect the
people who evaluate quality the generators to invoke the validator*
(i.e. with defalut settings).

This scenario has been stated again and again ever since 2007. It's
pretty frustrating that the scenario is still being misunderstood.

> How about the possibility of the vaildator having two
> separate yet side-by-side options based on the audience?  A simple
> user interface mockup is at:
> http://www.d.umn.edu/~lcarlson/research/206/byaudience.html
>
> The idea would be to have an audience section at the beginning of the
> page. If the "Generator Developers" radio button is selected the new
> attribute would kick in and allow the page to pass validation. And if
> the "Authors" radio button is selected it wouldn't. Check out the
> mockup and and let me know what you think.

This won't work, because people who evaluate the quality of markup
generators can be trusted to do so only in the "Generator Developers"
mode. It doesn't matter if running a validator with the default
setting on the output of a generator is the wrong way to evaluate the
quality of the generator.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Sunday, 5 August 2012 08:41:28 UTC