Re: When was the W3C HTML Validator launched?

2013-09-17 20:41, Jaime Iniesta wrote:

> Hello, I'm doing a bit of historical investigation and I'm curious about
> the launch date of the HTML validator.
>
> On the footer it says (C) 1994

To be exact, it says “Copyright © 1994-2012 W3C® (MIT, ERCIM, Keio)”, 
which suggests that 1994 was the year of first publication. Note that 
such copyright statements have no legal power in civilized countries; 
copyright exists (if it exists at all) independently of such statements

> but according to
> http://validator.w3.org/whatsnew.html#v13 the first release is from
> December 1997.

The page has a statement about a *change* in December 1997.

> When was it made publicly available for the first time?

Beats me. The oldest version at http://www.archive.org is from 1998, so 
it does not help.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, I would take year 1994 as 
the publication year. This sounds a bit early, since the W3C was founded 
in October 1994. It is possible that the expression “1994-2012” reflects 
this rather than the first publication of the validator.

Yucca

Received on Tuesday, 17 September 2013 18:01:09 UTC