- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2004 12:35:23 +0000 (UTC)
On Tue, 17 Aug 2004, James Graham wrote: > > I agree with your points but not the conclusion that you draw. In order > to conclude that automated syntax checking tools (aka 'validators') are > harmful, you must believe that the average quality of documents produced > in the complete absence of a validator would be better than the average > quality of the documents produced when a limited degree of automatic > validation is possible. Yeah, you may have a point there. > Your concerns can be somewhat alleviated by providing a validation > service but: > - Noting the limitations of the validator > - Not providing a badge to indicate valid markup And also making it check for things beyond what DTDs and Schemas can check for, yeah. I guess we now have the founding principles for a WHATWG validator tool! > I should just note that I believe that incorrect semantics are often > (perhaps even usually) more harmful than incorrect syntax. Absolutely. Incorrect syntax can have defined error-handling behaviour. Incorrect semantics can only rarely be detected at all. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Thursday, 26 August 2004 05:35:23 UTC