Re: "valid [X]HTML x.x!" icons are Evil

James Ralston wrote:

<CLIP>

> Yes, it's not fair: you thought your pages were valid, but correcting
> a bug in the spec caused them to be invalid.  The same would be true
> if the validator software contained a bug that caused it to
> erroneously label invalid pages as valid, and then the bug were
> corrected.  Unfortunately, life's not fair.


I wonder if this was a bug. If I run a page which no longer validates on 
the W3C page through Page Valet I get a "Character Set Not specified; 
using UTF-8" message, which is what I expect the W3C validator must have 
done in the past. (ex: http://www.domovina.net/index_srebrenica.html)

Fair or not, the W3C validator turns out to be unreliable and 
impractical [for us]. Therefore we shall no longer use it and hence our 
pages will no longer be validated/valid. I don't say this with joy - I 
believe in standards (http://domovina.xs4all.nl), but lost confidence in 
W3C altogether. Seeing a discussion forum which shows none of the dozen 
or so messages which we exchanged doesn't do much good either. The only 
organisations that survive are those that learn. Discontinuing a 
critical discussion isn't a sign of W3C willingness to learn from user 
input (not referring to my own suggestions but I do think you guys 
posted a number of very interesting propositions). Anyway...

Fortunately the Euro currency (EUR) will *not* be invalidated by a number 
of recently-found flaws in the system: the media discovered that most 
slot machines in Europe will accept Thai 10 Bath coins as EUR 2.00 coins 
(10 Bath equals EUR .25). Yet the EUR-introduction will take place in ten 
days. A system works as long as people have confidence in it  :-)

Best,
Frank

Received on Thursday, 20 December 2001 17:25:15 UTC