[Bug 1399] Description misrepresents what the validator does

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1399





------- Additional Comments From ot@w3.org  2005-05-17 23:24 -------
(In reply to comment #5)

Etan, I agree with a lot of points in your review of my proposed wording. Before we go any further, 
however, let me quickly explain my rationale for including the parts that you do not find acceptable.

> Using the qualification "helps check" is decent in that it doesn't claim to do
> everything. But in the comment #4 wording, which explicitly says "validity", the
> qualification is almost unnecessary (excepting the few hiccups over differences
> between SGML and XML). Worse, the qualification is far too easy to miss. We want
> people to notice the words of caution as much as they notice the  rest.

I see your point. I would have liked the tagline to use "validity" rather than "conformance", since it is 
validity we're checking here, but given that it's a validator, and given the rest of the sentence (e.g help 
check), perhaps this is not necessary.

> Specifying the formats is clutter.

Possibly. The problem here is that the validator, however named "markup validator" and validating 
everything from HTML to SMIL, MathML, and basically every language out there based on a DTD, it is 
still refered and thought of as the "HTML validator", and that's its main usage. I think it is crucial to 
have at least "HTML" in the tagline, or that term won't be present at all on the validator's homepage, 
which I don't consider acceptable in a user point of view.

Received on Tuesday, 17 May 2005 23:54:02 UTC