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

On 08/05/2012 04:40 AM, Henri Sivonen wrote:
> 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.

After routinely validating a page I recently started generating, it 
occurs to me that we may have two different definitions of words like 
"complain" here.

http://validator.nu/?doc=http%3A%2F%2Fintertwingly.net%2Ftmp%2Fclones.html

What I see is a lot of "complaining" (at least to my eyes) followed by 
the equivalent of a green badge at the very bottom.  On the W3C 
validator, the green indicator is at the top:

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fintertwingly.net%2Ftmp%2Fclones.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

This brings to mind a few questions.  Using Ted's latest proposal to 
help frame the question:

First, to Henri (and others): is your sole criteria that <p 
class=success> or <h2 class=valid> shows up in the results when 
validating pages which are properly marked up with generator-unknown-alt 
attributes?  In particular, you are ok with any number of warning or 
information messages being present in the output?

And to Laura (and others): Does the presence of at least one warning or 
information message in the results when validating pages which are 
properly marked up with generator-unknown-alt attributes satisfy your 
criteria as a "teachable moment", or do you require that such pages be 
marked as invalid?

- Sam Ruby

Received on Sunday, 26 August 2012 17:56:00 UTC