Re: w3.org site-wide markup review?

On 1 February 2011 16:04, Ian Jacobs <ij@w3.org> wrote:
...
> Still no plans for an external audit. (I don't think that's what Danny was
> referring to; I understood Danny's comments to be about site QA.)
...

I don't know what kind of audit was under discussion, but what I had
in mind was a check of the markup of every current page on the site to
see if it was of the highest machine-checkable standard possible
(valid against specs, conforming to guidelines as well as best known
practices). There may be exceptions with a handful of pages (e.g.
historic, archived material, demonstrations of how not to do things),
but in these cases there should be appropriate documentation and
markup-corrected versions made available.

I would expect the quality then to be maintained mechanically -
checking frequently (i.e. polling) and/or passing new & modified pages
through a quality filter before publication (event-driven).

Whether or not these processes themselves should be subject to
external review is probably a matter to leave until the current status
is known.

I'd leave content quality in the human-readable sense out of scope,
left to the wisdom of the document editors and the crowd outside
(because machine aren't very good at that sort of thing).

> Another way to say this is: a site-wide review is not as interesting to me as fixing real problems that people encounter.

That nicely captures the problem. An entirely reactive approach means
there's always likely to be more broken than necessary. For an
organisation who's raison d'etre is to improve the Web, their Web
presence should be as good as possible: "good enough" *isn't*. It goes
down to credibility.

Cheers,
Danny.

-- 
http://danny.ayers.name

Received on Tuesday, 1 February 2011 16:15:02 UTC