- From: Olivier Thereaux <ot@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 13:43:51 +0900
- To: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Cc: Nick Kew <nick@webthing.com>, Håkon Wium Lie <howcome@opera.com>, <www-validator@w3.org>
Bjoern, All. On Sunday, Mar 16, 2003, at 01:14 Asia/Tokyo, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: > I have often used the validator to help others fixing their site, but I > stopped doing so, when 0.6.0 went live, because I typically have to > submit the same page two, three and sometimes even four times in order > to get meaningful results. I also stopped advertising use of the W3C > MarkUp Validator alltogether [snip] The validator is developed by a very small team, and almost all of its development is volunteer work (the only "staffed" effort is the -mostly logistical- support Dom and I provide). Yet it has to juggle between the need to be: - "perfectly accurate", because many think of it as "the normative reference" (and not the spec itself...). - user-friendly, because it's the most famous validator for markup (even though there are other similar services, some as good, even better, that W3C's). You, Bjoern, have often reported (big or) small points in the specs that the validator did not get perfectly right. This post also shows that you're unhappy with its user-unfriendliness. As you have been a very useful contributor to this tool and service, it would not be appropriate to call your complaints unfair, yet I want to remind everyone, that we're talking about something developed by this community: if we want to make a perfect *and* user-friendly tool out of the validator, feedback is very good, participation is better. Feedback is important for the validator. Sometimes, the people coding disagree, most of the time there's just not enough time to make everything perfect. In such cases, the best thing one can do is to check out the code, come discuss on #validator (on the freenode IRC network), submit patches... I am sure there are a lot of hackers in this community : speak (or rather, patch) up, you're welcome. As for this particular issue, my *personal opinion* is somewhat in between : I would like to make the validator be more user-friendly, yet I appreciate the validator's strictness, I am not a big fan of "fallback" solutions... And I honestly think that the doctype error message is one of the best we have... I would rather see this community submit better documentation and improvements to the UI than adding fallback behaviour. Here are a few ideas, feel free to take them home (and back): - a "what does this mean" page linked from "this page is valid foo" results - a "what does this mean" page linked from "this page is not valid foo" results - a better, newbie-friendly explanation for the "no charset specified" page - a fluffed-up FAQ - alternate, newbie oriented explanations for the error messages (rewriting the error messages themselves is something that is being worked on in the code, but we have to free ourselves from the tight dependency to openSP before we can do this properly). etc. Cheers, olivier. -- Olivier Thereaux - W3C - QA : http://www.w3.org/QA/ http://www.w3.org/People/olivier | http://yoda.zoy.org
Received on Sunday, 16 March 2003 23:43:50 UTC