- From: Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 2 Dec 2006 23:00:06 -0500
Elliotte Harold wrote: >> The other half could be addressed by one little box >> in the corner of Firefox's status bar that's a smiley >> face if the page is valid, and a frown if it isn't. >> Most hand authors including myself don't always >> achieve well-formedness because nothing pricks us >> if we don't. Even the tiniest annoyance from a bad >> page, would cause us to check the error logs and >> fix the problems. >> Fixing a page to be well-formed and even valid XHTML >> is not hard, and well within the abilities of most people >> hand authoring HTML. The problem is when we don't >> realize we have a problem in the first place. >> Once we've noticed the problem, we're 90% of the way >> to solving it. You absolutely hit the nail on the head!!! I've been thinking along similar lines ever since all the fallout from TimBL's memo recent about XHTML & HTML. Your suggestion would go a long way towards ensuring people create well-formed XHTML, although I'd like it to (default to) be(ing) a little more obvious that a "little" box... Actually, that would work for concientious people with a clue, like you, but not for most people publishing to the web. I've always viewed that the best way to motivate change is to motivate the person who created the problem in the first place and who can also get it fixed, and avoidance of pain is a great motivator. I've been racking my brain for a way that web publishers could be *motivated* to fix their XHTML. And as I write this email, it's finally come to me one method that would work for even the most clueless and apathetic of web publishers: What if Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Live were to display a human-readable string, denoting the content type, hyperlinked to a web page that gives the details of that content type. For example, assume some future version of that the Web Apps current-work page was written in XHTML 1.0 yet it failed the validator; it could look like this (example from Google): Web Applications 1.0 The list of active formatting elements; 9.2.4.3.3. Creating and inserting HTML elements; 9.2.4.3.4. Closing elements that have implied end tags; 9.2.4.3.5. ... whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/ - Similar pages - XHTML 1.0 (WARNING) The "XHTML 1.0" would link to a description of XHTML 1.0 and it's content type and how it can be viewed, etc. etc. But the "WARNING" could be in BOLD RED type linking to a warning page that explained why the "Web Applications 1.0" page failed XHTML 1.0 validation, and it could include a link to a validator for retesting (The search engines could even use <BLINK> if they *really* wanted it to be effective; doh!) The search engines could also let people register validators so that validation didn't become a bottleneck. Validators would be required to correctly validate a variety of documents to be approved, and registered validators would get to serve advertising in exchange for their service. I'll *bet* if the search engines did this, we'd see the public get educated and documents cleaned up, but fast! And I can imagine that having more documented well formed on the web could only help the search engines be more accurate, so they should be motivated to do this. Thoughts? Or does someone see a whole in my theory? If not, Ian's from Google; what about Yahoo and Microsoft... ;-) -Mike Schinkel http://www.mikeschinkel.com/blogs/ http://www.welldesignedurls.org/ P.S. I might just have to blog this...
Received on Saturday, 2 December 2006 20:00:06 UTC