Re: Over 1500 invalid pages at www.w3.org

On Fri, Oct 12, 2001 at 11:41:23PM +0100, Nick Kew wrote:
> 
> As I write, Site Valet reports 1564 invalid pages at www.w3.org.

I'm sure there are many tens of thousands of invalid pages on our
site, maybe hundreds of thousands if you include lists.w3.org.

> I know Gerald tells us some of them are historic and won't change,
> but surely that can't apply to everything.  Does anyone care?

Sure, but like I wrote a couple weeks ago: [1]

    Although we would like our site to be 100% valid, we have
    hundreds of thousands of documents on our site including many
    that are there for historical interest (some of them predating
    formal HTML specifications), and it isn't practical for us to
    make them all valid HTML.

    Many sites would just remove these old documents instead of
    leaving them up there basically unmaintained, but I think we
    generally feel it's better to have this information online in
    an invalid form than not have it available at all. Ideally, we
    would have the manpower or technology to be able to go through
    and make them all valid, but in practice we have too many other
    things competing for our time to make that feasible.

I think most of the content we have published or updated recently
should be valid because a lot of the team and external collaborators
are using Amaya to edit their pages, and our TR publishing process
has improved over the years as well.

(that might make an interesting report: figure out what proportion
of pages published in 2001 are valid, then check again next year.)

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-qa/2001Sep/0031.html
    mid:20010929044151.B13029@w3.org

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny     http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)    http://www.w3.org/
tel:+1-613-261-6630             mailto:gerald@w3.org

Received on Friday, 12 October 2001 20:03:24 UTC