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Re: [ba-ohs-talk] (not) eating your own dogfood


Eugene Eric Kim wrote:    (01)

> A fella in Finland decided to check the homepages of the W3C's 506 member
> organizations for valid HTML or XHTML.  Only 18 sites validated.
> 
>   http://homepage.mac.com/marko/20020222.html    (02)


The big problem in web design is that almost nobody hand edits their
markup or even pays attention to it, and the GUI WYSIWYTYG (what you
see is what you think you get) editors in general produce some really
ugly markup. Many sites won't work at all without JavaScript turned on.
I challenge anyone to export "HTML" from MS Word and look at what it
creates. Amazing.    (03)

But I don't see that there's much to be done about this, given that
the emphasis from the W3C has never been much along the lines of
valid markup. It sometimes seems that they've done everything they
could to kill the use of the DTD, such that as a DTD and validation
advocate I often felt I was swimming upstream. While Tidy was initially
produced by Dave Raggett of the W3C, it itself doesn't produce valid
markup in many cases -- I've had to edit its output as well.    (04)

My guess is that those 18 sites may be managed by a validation zealot
like me, or had some type of company policy dictated by one. In the
end all one can do is produce better tools, or agitate for them, such
as this guy in Finland.    (05)

With the existence of XHTML and XML tools, it's actually pretty easy
to check one's markup nowadays, and even clean it up, so it's sad to
see so many corporate sites with poor design under the counter,
concentrating on flash rather than substance or interoperability.
But that's not unusual in business, is it?    (06)

Murray    (07)

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                         <mailto:m.altheim @ open.ac.uk>
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK    (08)

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu    (09)