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A recurrent issue of the "check referrer" question is that, very often, the people who click on the icon are not the actual page owner, but someone curious, and the results pages, with its flow of information, are somewhat confusing. The difficulty is to combine our policy that the icons should be set with a link to quick revalidation, as a "soft" guarantee that they are not misused, with the need to make the experience for people lost there a little less miserable. The development of a templated system for the validator's results finally gives us an opportunity to improve the situation. We could imagine a "simple view" of the results, with (subject to discussion): - no revalidation control - A quick intro text stating. "this page is the result of markup validation for the document located at [...]. You can learn more about _validation_, _why it matters_ and _how this validator works_ in our _FAQ and help_ document." - the "this page is (not) valid foo" banner. - (if applicable) the number of errors, with a link to full results. A cgi parameter would trigger this view, and I suggest that we could start by only triggering it when doing the redirect from uri=referer to uri=http://www.example.com/foo. Then, if it is popular, we could make it more widely available.
Related (remembered this from todo.html): [[ Make e.g. http://validator.w3.org/check/referer;imgonly return only an image showing the validation status of the referring page. ]]