Proposal: Polyglot validation in degrees - not boolean

Proposal: Polyglot markup documents should be validated by a Best 
Practice validator! In more detail:

  1. Conformance checking tends to be boolean - if no errors, then
     no message - validator is silent.
  2. Best practise checking, however, like Polyglot Markup
     checking, is by by nature an extra level of conformance.
     Thus a "no errors" message would be too little.
  3. Best Practice conformance checkers should therefore present
     the result as a list and as "degree of conformance". Some
     good practises (like redundant encoding declaration), should
     lead to "extra points" and thus be considered as "more than
     conformance", from Polyglot Markup’s point of view.

Primary benefits:

 A) that polyglot conformance-checking would become of value also 
    for those that don’t aim for full polyglot conformance, which
    in turn could broaden the interest within the HTMLwg as well;
 B) that polyglot conformance-checking could be performed in the
    same fashion and along the same scala regardless of the media
    type of the checked doc (text/html vs application/xhtml+xml).

  EXAMPLE: polyglot validation could be offered in the form of an
           "Show polyglot report" option, similar to the "Show
           Image Report" option of validator.nu.

How does this idea sound to the "Polyglot community"? Would this be 
worth filing a bug for? And against what should I file it?

And what do the "validation community", especially Henri and Mike, 
think? 
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2012 11:05:22 UTC