Re: Valid XML/XHTML Banners

On Sun, 27 Feb 2005,  wrote:

> I began to notice that many sites also claim to be
> CSS, HTML, XHTML etc. valid on their sites, and display a similar
> banner. At first out of curiosity, now morbid, I check many of the sites
> I visit, and was (no longer) shocked to discover less than 30% of these
> sites were in fact VALID....Despite their claims.

That's one reason why the icons are worse than useless. Another reason is
that they add nothing to the actual content of a site; instead, they
distract from it, and create pointless mysteries.

> The misrepresentation of "Validly Coded" websites is in fact degrading
> the entire idea and purpose of the system itself, in my opinion.

The idea was wrong from the beginning, as explained in my
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/validation.html#icon

> Anyways, is there a system in place to contact these websites?

Technically, any well-behaving Web site has at least a webmaster address.
But don't bother. The webmaster does not care, even if he happens to know
the people who put the icons there. There's no way anyone could force them
take the icons away. And I'm pretty sure the W3C wouldn't even want to
take any real action on this.

What the W3C _could_ do is to admit the mistake, stop recommending the use
of the icons, and take the icons away from their pages. Sites would still
be able to display the icons, but after some time, the fashion would fade
away.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 28 February 2005 16:48:37 UTC