Re: validation in Opera

Also sprach Terje Bless:

 > 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.

I respectfully disagree with you on this one. What you are doing is
raising the barrier for people who want to improve the quality of their
documents. Our experience is that Opera users have stopped using the
validator feature after the W3C validator started insisting on a doctype.

 > I might be persuaded that "hidden" options, that merely provide a default
 > fallback if the information is unavailable, is defensible. But I worry that
 > this would be taken as license to include these options in "This Page is
 > Valid Foo" links.

But the returned page doesn't have to say the page is valid. It should
still complain about the missing declaration, but it should't insist
to the point that it declares it to be a "Fatal Error" and stops processing. 

So, I'd very much try to convince you that a "hidden" option should be
added. It will not help the Opera installations that are out there
already, but most of our users upgrade quite often. 

 > However we are looking at other options for the future. Right now you can
 > get (beta) output in generic XML (and EARL/RDF and Notation3 for that
 > matter) from which you could pick whatever information you wanted, and for
 > the future we are looking at ways to provide a SOAP interface to the
 > service.
 > 
 > At that point the Validator is no longer an "Application", but rather an
 > API; letting the user of that API (e.g. Opera) pick and choose what
 > warnings and information s/he wants would be appropriate.

I can see the use for this kind of "web service", but I think a decent
HTML page is good enough for most users. Having to do extensive
processing in the client will be a problem in resource-constrained
environements.

 > Now Playing "Fimbul" by "To Rustne Herrer"",
 >  from the album "Damebesøk".

So, we should really communicate in Norwegian :-)?

-h&kon
              Håkon Wium Lie                          cto °þe®ª
howcome@opera.com                  http://people.opera.com/howcome

Received on Friday, 14 March 2003 17:36:49 UTC