Re: Some quick ideas

Rotan Hanrahan <Rotan.Hanrahan@MobileAware.com> wrote:

>As AC Rep for Mobileaware, at the recent AC meeting I made some
>suggestions. Here they are, for your consideration. If you want
>clarifications, reply to the list and cc me directly.
>
>--- If validator gives boolean result, then "false" is so negative that
>you are not encouraged to try again. --- But if validator gives a
>ranking (e.g. percentage) then you are encouraged to improve your
>result. Eventually you get 100% and are conformant.

I'm not certain a percentage is necessarily the best way to indicate the
progress, but I like this idea for encouraging users to "stick with it".

Unfortunately, I don't immediately see any way to actually do something
like this. The current beta does tell you how many errors were detected --
which does give some sort of indication of your progress -- but that's
about as far as I can see this going.

If you have any ideas about what criteria could be used to determine a
percentage(-ish) progress, and how to present this to the user, we would
very much like to hear them.


>--- Validator should give tips to remedy non-conformant sites/pages
>based on analysis of non-conformant pages.

Have you seen the new "Tip of the Day" feature in the current Beta release?
It is not context sensitive (in that it doesn't give a tip to match the
errors detected in the current document), but it does give you hints
regarding common mistakes and best practices.

http://validator.w3.org:8001/


>--- On-line validator should keep track of most common errors and feed
>results to WGs who are interested in improving authoring tools. (This
>could be *very* useful.)

Keeping statistics on what sorts of errors are found is a good idea (and I
think Gerald had plans to implement this at some point). I've logged this
as Bug #85 <URL:http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=85>.


>--- Our s/w uses XHTML as its primary input, generating all kinds of
>output formats. Can we use W3C validator in our input pipeline?

Sure. It looks like we'll end up keeping the XML Output option -- allthough
it will still be in beta when the new version is released -- which might
give you what you need for this. For the future, we're investigating adding
a SOAP interface for this purpose.

But note well; for high volume or production purposes you will be much
better off running a local instance of the Validator instead of hitting
w3.org over the network.


Thanks for your feedback!

-- 
"Python 2.0 beta 1 is now available from BeOpen PythonLabs.   There is a long
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Received on Sunday, 24 November 2002 12:39:09 UTC