Re: MarkUp Validator's new clothes

On Apr 16, 2004, at 19:11, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
>   Improving the usability of the W3C MarkUp Validator includes
> improvements for the layout; it would thus be great to get some
> discussion on this matter and ideally see some proposals on how
> it could be improved

Agreed, absolutely. I'll note that our change of style for the beta 
validator announced today is an attempt at making things look better, 
but that should not preclude anyone to work on and propose something 
different, even wildly so.

> My alternate format differs in the following ways:
>   * it groups identical error messages, this helps to identify

This is a nice addition indeed. "Ideally" we'd find a way to do both, 
at the user's discretion.

>   * no right-hand navigation bar, I think it just distracts
>     and takes space

Yes, your demo (earlier today) quite convinced me that (at least now 
that the most important links are in the horizontal top bar) the 
righthand navbar could be kept only for the homepage, and real-estate 
reclaimed on other pages, especially results page. So +1 on that, and 
I'll work on implementing that on our current layout.

>   * the address of the validated page is not locked inside
>     an <input> field but rather an active link to the page

Well, the markup validator gives it as a link if valid, in the field to 
revalidate if not. I suppose consistency wouldn't hurt, though.

>   * it does not include the overly large and distracting
>       THIS PAGE IS NOT VALID HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL!
>     banner. I'd say it's not needed

I guess something needs to say valid/not.
But it does not have to be a big banner, certainly.

>   * it does not include page source. I am not sure whether
>     it should. It's sometimes useful, sometimes not. It's
>     not what I intended to demonstrate...

Fair enough. Your demo shows that you can show the problem in the 
source by putting it next to the error message. I still think that at 
least an option should make it possible to see the whole source, as it 
gives context, but that's just MHO.

>   * it does not include the navigation elements on the top,
>     it certainly should, but again, that's been out of scope

yes.

>   * it does not include all this legal stuff in the footer,
>     whether it must I do not know; I would not put it there

That's been imposed, for good reasons I reckon. I am not the expert, 
and I am happy with their inclusion in a way that is not too showy, e.g 
as Terje did it.

>   * it looks much much better, IMHO, and the styles are cross-
>     browser, the validator beta has issues with IE/Windows.

Quite frankly, though I don't pretend to be a style-sheet expert, I 
would say that IE/Win has issues with the validator. Nuance...

> How would you re-design the Validator?
> Feel free to take my XSLT and modify it or just download validator
> output, change what you like and get back to us!

Everyone, yes, please do. This is a big chance to show that validation 
does not have to rhyme with ugly, so thanks a lot to Bjoern for showing 
this can be done, and I'm looking forward to seeing what others do from 
here / with the same idea.

Thank you.
-- 
olivier