Idea for the validators

Hi there!
I'm a web-designer and I make a point of sticking to the standards when 
I make pages. To show that I have I usually include your "Valid HTML 
(or whatever)" buttons on my pages as links to your validation service.

I was recently showing one of my pages to a friend and he didn't know 
what the "valid html" meant so he clicked on it and got the validation 
results. However, not being a web-designer himself and not knowing what 
html was or why it was important he was quite confused by the page.

This gave me an idea: Why don't you offer an alternative, in-layman's 
terms results page that people like me can link to instead? (i.e.: 
don't talk in terms of resources and xhtml transitional and code 
snippits)

I'm thinking that just says something along the lines of:

This page is valid html!

This means the author of the page you came from took the care to create 
a web-page that adheres to the relevant standards. These standards are 
important since they ensure that information on the web is accessible 
to all people, regardless of what kind of computer or web-browser they 
are using.

To find out more about internet standards and their relevance please 
visit these links...

[some useful links, w3c, wasp etc...]


Of course if the page turns out to be not valid it should say something 
like:


Oops! The author of the page you just came from is claiming that his 
page sticks to web standards. Unfortunately our test has just 
discovered that it doesn't. It's quite probably a simple mistake of the 
author (like a typo), please go back and mention this error to him.

Web-standards are important because of bla bla bla....



You guys can probably word it a lot better than me but I think you get 
the idea of what I'm saying. Please don't get me wrong, for technical 
people like me the validator results are perfect. It's an invaluable 
resource for the likes of me (thanks, btw!), but I'm doubtful whether 
it's useful for promoting the use of standards to 'normal' web users.
What I'd like to see one day is the little W3C logo being recognised as 
a kind of seal of quality by normal users!

I'm not actually on this mailing list, so if you want to reply to me 
about this please use my email address: cirrus@linuxgames.com


Thanks for taking the time to read this. Hope you like it and keep up 
the good work!

		-James

Received on Sunday, 27 July 2003 07:43:53 UTC