Re: validator results page - don't break web with fancy features - show information with more clicks

Hello Daniel,

Thank for your message. Your feedback is very welcome, and I hope we  
can work together to address it.

On Mar 2, 2007, at 02:29 , Daniel Barclay wrote:
> The CSS validator's results page's use of fancy features breaks the
> way the web normally works.

This sounds a little exaggerated to me. The way I see it:

* Validation results include information on how to link to results,  
use the icon
   These are useful, but take up a lot of space for a message that  
will generally only be read once.
* Validation results include errors if any, and warnings. The  
warnings have caused some unease, and we tried having them take less  
space through a mix of scripting and style
* the mechanism used is not breaking anything. Thanks to suggestions  
from the user community, it has been made properly accessible, and it  
also degrades gracefully in case scripting is not enabled, or  
stylesheets not supported. It may not, however, be the most pleasant  
interaction mechanism, but I haven't seen any complaint so far,  
before yours.

> If the pages of the W3C don't reflect the philosophy of paying
> attention to good design (or do reflect faddish or ill-considered
> use of powerful features), we can't count on the W3C for guidance
> any more.

This is a bit over-dramatic, isn't it? Let's try and look at it  
constructively:

* The changes have been made to satisfy a demand from the user  
community to have smaller, more easily usable results page, and with  
warnings taking less space. Do you have any suggestion of a change  
that would still satisfy this demand, but please you more?

* The design of our validators is not cast in stone, and if some  
choices are bad they will be dropped, and if we can find better ways  
to make the validator usable, we will use them. At this point I've  
been experimenting with a slightly adapted look and feel for the  
Markup Validator:
http://qa-dev.w3.org/wmvs/HEAD/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.apple.com% 
2F;ss;st
Would this also work for the CSS validator? Would it be better than  
what we have at present?

Thank you.
-- 
olivier Thereaux - W3C - http://www.w3.org/People/olivier/
W3C Open Source Software: http://www.w3.org/Status

Received on Tuesday, 6 March 2007 04:36:03 UTC