- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 00:31:10 +0300 (EEST)
- To: "Philip TAYLOR [PC336/H-XP]" <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- cc: Eric Anderson <anderson@cs.uoregon.edu>, "" <www-validator@w3.org>, cirrus <cirrus@linuxgames.com>
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Philip TAYLOR [PC336/H-XP] wrote: > I agree > with Eric that the seal-of-approval is no bad thing > in itself So now "Valid HTML!" is a seal of approval? By whom or by which organization? I thought the W3C does _not_ regard the icon as an approval by the W3C in any sense. > As to the contents of that page, > it might start somewhat along the following lines : I'm afraid your proposal just confirms what I have said: it is impossible to write a description of validation that would be understandable to the general public, and it would mostly be worse than useless if it were possible. Please sit back and imagine that you are an ordinary Web surfer who just happened to click on an icon out of curiosity - this should be taken as the typical case. If this is difficult, ask someone (who is not authoring Web pages) do the exercise of reading the text. > Valid HTML ! Looks like an advertisement, does it not? This might be useful since so many people routinely skip anything that looks like an ad. > The page from which you have just come claims to be valid HTML. So why should I care? Why does this obscurily say what a page claims? It's a claim about a page making a claim about something obscure. > Why does this matter ? What does it matter to me, the poor Web surfer who clicked on an icon? > Well, the page forms a part (a very small > part !) of the World-Wide Web. I sort-of knew _that_. > And in order for that Web to function > properly, each part of it must follow some basic rules. Well, maybe, but why are you explaining that to _me_ (the poor Web surfer who misclicked and has a vague idea of something called HTML but couldn't care less)? > I'm sure it could say more No, I don't think the page could be made essentially better than your proposal. It just should not be created at all, since the very idea is wrong. If you wish to try and explain to Web _authors_ what validation is, that would be a different thing. And there would be no reason to encourage people to use icons that link to that page on their normal pages. It could be a very good idea to encourage authors of a very small minority of pages, namely those discussing Web authoring, to link to the page - using normal links, not mystic icons. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 29 July 2003 17:31:27 UTC