- From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 04:55:38 +0100
- To: Terje Bless <link@pobox.com>
- Cc: W3C Validator <www-validator@w3.org>, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>
* Terje Bless wrote: >>As you may know, the Opera browser offers to validate pages by >>uploading the source to the W3C validator. [...] This feature >>doesn't work very well at the moment. There are two problems: >> >> 1) lack of DOCTYPE in documents, and >> 2) lack of <meta http-equiv >What you are asking for is in essence that the Validator provide defaults >for these two values when one is not explicitly given. We've considered >this long and hard and come to the conclusion that this is the least >desireable solution; it gives users little or no incentive to fix this. What's the incentive to fix a missing alt attribute on an img element? The validator just reports the error and tells the user the document is invalid. Following your rationale the validator should report the error and stop any further processing. Let me quote Henry S. Thompson on this issue (<http://www.w3.org/mid/f5bof6bzz76.fsf@erasmus.inf.ed.ac.uk>): [...] I think the role of the validator is to help people debug their web pages, so that we get a better web, and I don't think the current behaviour wrt missing DOCTYPE and/or charset is achieving that. I've never seen (or would certainly never use a 2nd time) a compiler that stopped processing my source file the first time it saw an error. [...] People visiting <http://validator.w3.org/> already got an incentive checking and probably fixing their documents. And many of them lose it right there :-(
Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2003 22:54:48 UTC