Re: The state of our web site and standards

[Kenny Graunke <kenny whitecape org>]

On Friday 30 March 2001 04:26 am, Daniel Veillard wrote:
>   Basically our web site is looking like a assertion that the Gnome
> project don't care about standards compliance. Let's take our main
> web page and try to check it's conformance:
>
>   http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=www.gnome.org&doctype=Inline

Indeed. I've looked at this several times, it was a bit saddening. I do not 
know how to fix this, as it is apparently written in WML (Website Meta 
Language), in module gnomeweb-wml. It has not built here in ages due to WML 
issues - I hate to touch it. I also believe that some of these problems were 
done on purpose, so I do not feel comfortable trying to fix them...I imagine 
many others feel the same way.

> http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.gnome.org%2Fgnome-news%
>2F&doctype=Inline
>
>   Result: 50+ errors

I don't have a clue how the news site works, but this should also be fixed.

>   Just for the record, http://www.kde.org/ tries to comply to XHTML-1.0
> (okay they broke it by adding ISO-Latin-1 character in a document labelled
> as UTF8, so they have some work left to do too :-). The fact that they
> actually designed a complete browser within the project probably helped,
> but this kind of results are not the result of good luck, this proves
> something about the project.

Indeed. Many of the KDE websites have validated for ages...some of them even 
have W3C Valid HTML logos.

>   However I'm very happy to see that http://developer.gnome.org/
> is a valid HTML page :-).

Yes, a while back I fixed developer.gnome.org (web-devel-2)'s HTML template 
which had a small tag-closing error causing it to fail the validity test. I 
don't know if every page is valid - I plan to test and fix each page 
eventually. developer.gnome.org doesn't explicitly try to break anything, so 
there should be no problems getting this site completely valid. It's also 
quite easy to work with, as it is plain HTML.

>   What can be done:
[snip]

Yes, these definately need doing.

>   I still prefer a simpler but valid Web page design than flashy but
> horribly broken stuff, I don't think I'm the only one ;-)

You certainly aren't - I agree completely. I feel that it is very sad if a 
large free software project does not even support simple things like 
standards compliant webpages.

> Daniel

Kenny