Global Answer to the recent complaints about warnings

Hi,
We knew that adding all these warnings would create some arguments ;)
I will try to answer to most of your questions.

<ul>
<li>First of all, about the high number of warnings. If you don't want
to see them when you validate a CSS, you can append &warning=0 (or
another number, to deactivate only some warnings) at the end of the
validation url, so you won't get all these annoying warnings. As I said
in my previous mail, they are "be careful" or "helper" warnings rather
than "this is valid but probably won't work" warnings. They can be
useful for the developer, but can be hidden to the user. The warning
parameter is here for that.
The default warning level will probably change so that all those
annoying warnings will disappear in the default validation.
I think it could be useful to have a small sentence in the result page
that precise the aim of these warnings, so that everybody can understand
the meaning of the warnings.
Another reason to the huge number of warnings is that before the latest
version, if they were multiple warnings on a unique line, only one was
shown. This might be a good thing to restore this behavior.</li>
<li>Then, about the "#autoXML604169604169" warnings.
When you insert CSS properties to a markup through the style attribute,
the validator automatically gives it a unique identifier as if you
specified an id attribute in your HTML and defined the corresponding #id
block in a separate CSS.
So, if these "inline" stylesheet produce warnings, the validator warns
about these strange ids. This could be quite weird, but you don't have
to be scared by these ids :) .</li>
<li>Now, about the "background-color: transparent" warning, we decided
to add it after a small talk with a member of the CSS WG, and this "bug"
(it is not really a bug) report
http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=768 .</li>
<li>Finally, we know that some warnings are mysterious and not very
understandable, I will see with my former internship boss if someone can
make them more precise.</li>
</ul>

I hope I answered to most of your questions, but I must add that the CSS
Validator is a free project, and that it does not have a full-time staff
working on it. People that develop it also have other jobs in W3C that
take them a lot of time, so don't blame them if they don't answer
quickly to your questions.

Regards,

Jean-Guilhem Rouel

Received on Tuesday, 11 October 2005 11:05:17 UTC