- From: Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2012 01:18:20 +0900
- To: "Jens O. Meiert" <jens@meiert.com>
- Cc: www-validator@w3.org
"Jens O. Meiert" <jens@meiert.com>, 2012-07-30 07:59 -0700: > > I agree about the advantages of making the analysis less impenetrable, > > but I would strongly argue against any suggestion that the validator should > > appear to patronise. > > For clarification, I suggested this as an author could well know what > he’s doing, I'd suggest that optimizing checkers for users who know what they are doing is generally the wrong optimization to make. As a user who generally knows what he's doing I don't mind getting additional helpful error messages that I can just ignore. But were I a user who didn't know what he's doing, I would be really glad to have some additional messages from the validator that might help get closer to becoming a user who knows what he's doing. > and hence doesn’t need to be told what otherwise valid > elements or attributes to use. :) That's the case as well for some other kinds of messages we currently omit. Unlike some previous validators, the goal of this one is not to tell users that they pass or fail, and give them a badge. Instead the goal it to help users catch problems in their markup they might otherwise have not found, and in some cases to inform them of problems outside of the document itself (e.g., the fact that particular features are not implemented in browsers, despite being part of the spec, or to inform them about problems in HTTP headers, such as using the non-standard X-UA-Compatible header. So in that regard the validator is essentially as linter, and as with other linters, there's not universal agreement among all users about what level of "helpful" messages to include. Some users want more, some users want less. To compare it to some other linters: Some users are quite happy with JSLint. Some users aren't. If they were happy, we'd not have JSHint. Anyway, I recently was made aware of a valitor.nu-based validator at http://validator.keegan.st/ (from Keegan Street) that has a filter feature in the (post-validation) Web UI to allow you to filter out any classes of messages and/or any particular message you don't want to see. I've talked with Henri a bit about the idea of merging that filter feature into the upstream validator.nu code. If we can agree it's a good idea, that would mean it'd eventually be part of the default UI for the validator.nu and W3C Nu Markup Validation UIs. --Mike -- Michael[tm] Smith http://people.w3.org/mike
Received on Monday, 30 July 2012 16:18:29 UTC