Re: The state of our web site and standards

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 09:55:24PM -0500, Iain wrote:
> Basically it's not.
> How many people run a validator on sites they go to? I would imagine a
> VERY VERY small minority.
> It's not like someone's going to come upon the site and say "Hmm, this
> GNOME thing looks damn cool, but awwww, their site doesn't validate, I'm
> not touching that".

  Well, there is a lot of side effects to have shitty HTML, you break
"special" browers and tools. Your assertion that individual may not
look at the compliance of web pages is a bit surprizing to me. I have
seen people say "Gnome is crap they don't care about standards", and not
using it. I have at least 2 examples in my previous working enviroment
so it's no zero ! And I think both Telsa an me are frustrated by this
at least.

> So basically, I think having a standards compliant website, while nice,
> isn't all that important, and there's far more important things to do
> with the website. It's definatly not "an embarassment" or whatever Telsa
> claimed it was.
 
  I want to make sure that as we rebuild the website we make it compliant.
It's like correcting other people crappy code, it's exactly the same, you
can tell "it works for me", I'm saying it's not a proof that it's okay.
Plus automating checkes at that level is like regression testing, you
better have it automated than wait for people 

> Plus, that Bobby thing just gets anal to stupid extremes. The last site
> I wrote and ran through it, I was marked down because I didn't include
> the size of images in the alt tag. (NB, some of the Bobby things are
> useful, but not all of them.)

  I didn't sugested to use Bobby, it's a second step, but reading the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines becfore redoing the web site design
sounds to me a good idea.

> Finally, DV, you could always fix it, as you suggested to Jacob when he
> pointed out bugs in nautilus. (Kinda tongue in cheek)

  Yep, tell me how and where to fix the top web page and I am
ready to spend 2 hours on it. Now you may not like how I do it, but I
will happily spend this time if the current designer don't consider
this useful. !

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat Network http://redhat.com/products/network/
veillard redhat com  | libxml Gnome XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/