RE: Validity as a technique

Maurizio Boscarol wrote the following comment to my proposal to delete the
requirement from validity from the guidelines and address it in techniques
instead:

> Your proposal sounds really interesting, and perfectly 
> "catching" most of the basic problems with the topic.
> Just I'm not sure I fully understand what - validity as a 
> necessary but not sufficient technique for all the success 
> criteria that require something can be 'programmatically 
> determined' -  means.

It means that we say in techniques that valid code is necessary for things
that need to be determined. The reason for this is only when a page is valid
can you be sure that a parser can programmatically determine some property. 

Valid code is not sufficient for many of the guidelines however. In all the
cases where we require some property can be programmatically determined, you
must also make sure you set that property. For example if want to
programmatically determine the language of the document, you would have to
specify that language in a manner supported by the specification.

> 
> Validity isn't a tecnique: it is a document property. I think 
> we should say that *validating a page*, in the sense of 
> "using a code validator to determine validity error", is 
> necessary but not sufficient (or another approriate formula) 
> to test the success criteria that require something can be 
> programmatically determined.

I slightly disagree: I think writing valid code is a technique. How to test
for that is a different subject and not a technique as such. 

Yvette Hoitink
Heritas, Enschede, the Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl
WWW: http://www.heritas.nl

Received on Monday, 7 November 2005 18:47:54 UTC