Re: Thanks a lot

On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Frank Tiggelaar wrote:

> Over the past year we have taken great care to validate all new pages
> and pages on our site which were changed in any way. We added the small
> W3C logo to all of the pages we validated. Recently we found out that
> none of the pages which validated some time ago are validated today -
> suddenly 'character encoding' has become required.
>
> We think this amounts to moving the goalposts during the game and our
> confidence in the w3c validation setup has completely gone.

Now you mention it, this is indeed a serious issue, and I have to
agree with your comment about moving the goalposts.  Updating the
validator is fair enough; breaking peoples "valid HTML" badges isn't.

Can I suggest that in future, any changes that might affect page
validity (and hence users of the badge) be handled by updating the
validator URL, leaving the existing "/check/referer" intact?

ISTR discussing whether an explicit charset declaration should be
required here before, but I can't remember the outcome.  Can someone
remind me what the basis is for requiring it in cases that use
(or are strictly subsets of) default charsets iso-8859-1 for HTML
or UTF-8 for XML.

FWIW, the validator in my .sig will tell you if no charset is specified,
but won't refuse to validate.

> Therefore we stopped validating our pages; we shall remove all 7,000
> little W3c-validated logos from our websites.

That is indeed a shame.

> We wish the W3C staff pleasant dreams in their ivory tower.

I have no affiliation with W3C.  I just exchange ideas with them
on subjects of common interest :-)

-- 
Nick Kew

Site Valet - the essential service for anyone with a website.
<URL:http://valet.webthing.com/>

Received on Thursday, 6 December 2001 18:18:50 UTC