Stats O' the Day

[Thomas Dowling]

I've gathered some of my thoughts and comments on validation and put
them up at <URL:http://gold.ohiolink.edu/tdowling/validation.html>,
including a list of validation tools I've tried out.


> From: Roy Tennant <rtennant at library.berkeley.edu>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Re: Stats O' the Day
> Date: Monday, February 10, 1997 6:26 PM
> 
> ...Now we all need to take it to heart and turn an critical eye 
> on our pages with http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/TR/REC-html32.html in our
hands.
> Roy Tennant

If we aren't beating a dead horse by now, it's at least looking unwell.
 But it's fair to point out that some people have serious reservations
about HTML 3.2, or "HTML puttanesca" as I like to think of it.  While
3.2 is the most "standard" version of HTML since 2.0, it calls itself
an attempt to describe browser behavior as of early- or mid-1996.  I've
heard from a couple of people who don't believe this is sufficiently
rigorous for their needs; there have also been posts which indicate
this is not sufficiently up to date for some needs.  I don't think the
specific standard you compare yourself against is as important as
knowledgeably picking *some* standard and getting a good idea of how
you fare on that comparison.


> From: Tim Tripp <ttripp at inforamp.net>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Re: "Proper" HTML (was Re: status o' the day)
> Date: Monday, February 10, 1997 7:20 PM
>
> All I care about is that the page displays properly.  How many of
you,
> when you recieve a WordPerfect document go in and check for
extraneous
> <Bold On><Bold Off> tags?  I guess I fall into Alex's latter category
of
> people who don't care.  My question is, Is there something I'm
missing?...

One problem with this comparison is that it's hard to imagine looking
at a WordPerfect document with any thing much different than another
copy of WordPerfect (incl Word or WordPro, etc.).  The browser arena
has always been much more diverse than that, and could easily be on the
brink of rapid fragmentation: web browsers are already available for
speech synthesizers and TVs, they're starting to come out for handheld
computers, and they're on the way for devices like pagers and
telephones.  The further some of these browsers get from the desktop
computing metaphor, the less you can rely on saying "well, it looks
okay in Netscape so it must work for pretty much everybody."


Thomas Dowling
Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu