Improvement suggestion: group repeated errors

Hello,

This has problably been suggested before, but EVERYTIME i use the validator
i wonder why such a obvious thing isn't implemented yet:

When errors occur repeatedly, instead of displaying every single occurance,
sum them up in one grouped entry.

the problem with the current listing is that pages that a few simple errors
that are repeated throughout the page inflate the error count and the length
of the report incredibly, hiding any other (maybe more critical) errors
in a flood of repetitions.
this causes (in my personal experience) people to just give up making their
pages compliant because the sheer amount of errors seems to much to handle.

so instead of:
    1. Line 67, column 11: there is no attribute "LEFTMARGIN"
    2. Line 67, column 25: there is no attribute "TOPMARGIN"
    3. Line 67, column 41: there is no attribute "MARGINWIDTH"
    4. Line 67, column 58: there is no attribute "MARGINHEIGHT"
    5. Line 112, column 11: required attribute "ALT" not specified
    6. Line 749, column 90: reference to entity "tid" for which no
    7. Line 754, column 63: reference to entity "mode" for which no
    8. Line 169, column 27: there is no attribute "HEIGHT"
    9. Line 173, column 21: required attribute "ALT" not specified
   10. Line 754, column 63: reference to entity "mode" for which no
   11. Line 754, column 74: reference to entity "tid" for which no
   12. Line 180, column 12: required attribute "ALT" not specified
   13. Line 184, column 39: required attribute "TYPE" not specified
   (yes, it's edited)

there could be:

use of undefined attributes: 5 errors (lines 1,2,3,4,7...)
 - why you shouldn't use proprietary attributes

missing "alt" attributes: 3 errors (lines 5,8,9...)
 - why specifying alt texts is important

references of undefined entities: 4 errors (lines ...)
 - how you should encode cgi parameters correctly

an so on...

that way, instead of throwing a huge list of small errors at users,
they can instead be shown what they are systematically doing wrong
and how they need to fix their coding style.


- Thorben Thuermer

Received on Monday, 12 July 2004 13:06:52 UTC