Re: Conformance ratings (was: Extra! Microsoft beats Netscape in the race for...

In a message dated 96-02-12 16:25:30 EST, eric@gauthier.centre.edu (Eric
Gauthier) writes:

>Anyway, it sounds like a great idea and I'd love to get in on it,
>but I think the bandwidth and server load that it would take up
>at lycos and yahoo would be to large for them to want to do this.
>It would be interesting.  If anyone out there is interested, I'm
>game...

The overhead would be minor compared to the computation required to do the
full-text indexing. Bandwidth is not an issue since the page had to be
fetched to index it.

I would suggest these categories:

1) Errors - pages containing severe errors like overlapping tags,
quote/comment problems. Any page that can't be parsed by a SGML system gets
this rating. This doesn't mean all of the tags/attributes will be understood,
it just means that the page is not lexically correct.

2) HTML1 - Is this needed?

3) HTML2

4) Extended HTML2  -  tables and extensions common to several browsers. A
general rule could be that the extension must exist in at least four
browsers.

5) Vendor specific - pages that will only work on specific browsers (frames,
Java, VBScript, etc..)

Vendors will need to provide a DTD to validate against. A page that is
lexicalyl correct yet fails 2-5 would be vendor specific where the vendor is
unknown.

Sites that generate multiple pages based on the User-Agent field could get
more than one rating.

Jon Smir, jonsm@aol.com

Received on Monday, 12 February 1996 17:45:21 UTC