Re: Idea for the validators

Greetings James,

On Tuesday, Jul 29, 2003, at 03:12 Asia/Tokyo, cirrus wrote:
> As regards Jukka's comments I have to say I don't agree.

Well, Jukka was obviously playing the devil's advocate here, and he 
certainly raised some very interesting points.

> I am of the opinion that sticking to the standards is very important.

Most certainly, but I believe Jukka's main point was not that standards 
are not important...

> In my opinion in order to make any real difference you need to raise
> awareness of standards. If (and I realise this is a big IF) you could
> make the average joe care about standards, if they saw a W3C tick on a
> page and thoughtto themselves "Oh cool, this page is well made and
> probably works in all kinds of browsers and gimzos" - then you might
> make a difference.

Yes, raising awareness *among web authors* is important.

But for the general public, for all the people who will see the W3C 
badge and are likely to follow the link? There are a lot of "standards" 
in every industry, that have an influence on my daily life, but I'm 
certainly not aware of them and it's not a problem. I don't need to 
know about all these standards, but the people who made the appliances 
or come to repair them should. Hence Jukka's point that people should 
stop putting the badges on their pages.

Fair enough. However no one mentioned re-validation yet, which, for me 
(as web author), is the main practical purpose of the badge. Whether 
this is worth cluttering one's page with a badge, whether the fact that 
anyone could follow the link and be puzzled is an acceptable tradeoff, 
all this is the author's choice...

And since Web authors actually put the badges on their pages, since 
other people follow the link and get stranded on the validation results 
page, there is a need for an explanation page, even if it is not going 
to change the face of the world by creating some global awareness of 
web standards ;)

So thanks James for your enthusiasm (I'll be sure to have you review 
the page once it's up), and thanks Jukka too for the reminder that (at 
least for technology) doubt can be as interesting as faith...

cheers,
-- 
olivier Thereaux - W3C - QA : http://www.w3.org/QA/
http://www.w3.org/People/olivier | http://yoda.zoy.org

Received on Monday, 28 July 2003 22:07:41 UTC