[whatwg] Re: Doctype FPI

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Tim Bray wrote:
> 
> Agreed, but as a Web Designer who is almost never smart enough to get a 
> page design right first time, and who thus spends time crawling down CSS 
> rat-holes, I have to say that the online HTML and CSS validators are 
> incredibly useful at helping me find my more obvious bugs, and thus are 
> huge time-savers.  Nobody claims that having validated successfully 
> really proves anything of much use, but precise indications of how & 
> where you're *not* valid are incredibly useful.

I agree that it can be useful if you know its limitations.

My concern is mostly that there _are_ claims that having validated 
successfully proves something of much use, otherwise why would pages 
proudly display icons saying "This is valid!" and why would the validator 
so unconditionally praise authors who successfully validate a document?


> Thus I think the work of the WHAT-WG would be substantially more useful 
> to the community if it were accompanied by some sort of validator that 
> would help people like me deal with the consequences of our own 
> stupidity.

I could definitely see benefits to providing a validator service, if it 
was clearly labelled as just doing very basic syntax checking.


> I agree with someone else who suggested that Relax-NG/Schematron would 
> be the sensible way to go about constructing such a thing.  I would 
> further point out that the RelaxNG community is full of people in 
> evangelism mode who might be inclined to pitch in and help if asked.

Thanks for the advice!

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'