Re: validator - how true is it?

* <ceo@alierra.com> wrote:
>Validator has a very good concept behind it.  But the way it is
>programmed right now creates chaos on inexperienced web users.
>For some unknown reason many lay users consider Validator to be
>their GOD and they believe that the results are 100% true. They
>take a Validator report and start bombarding design companies
>that their sites have a great number of errors which must be
>fixed immediately. And whenever you try to explain that these
>errors may stay unfixed they do not want to hear anything about
>that.

Of course not, you would rather need to argue that the errors are not
errors or that fixing them would cause unavoidable loss of quality or
functionality. Such "errors" are however rare in practise. As are the
cases you mention here, where errors may stay unfixed; you would need
to know how future browser (search engine robots, etc) releases treat
the errors in order to make statements about that. But maybe you mean
"may" in a legal sense; this would be subject to applicable law which
is out of scope of the W3C Quality Assurance tools AFAICT. If these
design companies you mentioned deliver products that do not meet the
quality requirements of their customers they do indeed have a problem,
but it seems that expectation management is part of the job of those
design companies, to me it seems perfectly reasonable to expect such
a design company to deliver standards compliant works and it seems
natural to complain if they do not.

>Frankly speaking, before the Validator release its developers
>should have explained that their program is being developed and
>the reports may not be considered as a practical guide to action. 

If you can point out sections in one of the specifications one of the
tools claims to implement that is not implemented properly, please do.
You can use e.g. http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/BUGS to search
existing bug reports and file new ones.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
68309 Mannheim · PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 · http://www.websitedev.de/

Received on Saturday, 15 January 2005 12:24:48 UTC