Re: The state of our web site and standards

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 09:55:24PM -0500 or thereabouts, Iain wrote:
  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I appear to have got this rather late. Ah well.

> >   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:
> 
> Basically it's not.
> How many people run a validator on sites they go to? I would imagine a
> VERY VERY small minority.

Nod, but some of them then post the results... And if the results get
posted and widely carried on a slow news day, then it will become more
of an issue. 

And yes, I -do- run validators on sites commonly, largely when I want 
to steal someone's HTML I'm not sure about. Or because I can't read
the damn thing with Lynx and I feel like giving the webmaster some
pointers to validators and relevant legislation. 

> 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".

However, if the accessibility argument is not reaching you: 

"Oh, I just read this. GNOME is promoting a new standard/architecture/library"
"Uh-huh. Standards-compliant?"
"Should be."
"That's the same project which touts standards and can't even validate
its homepage, right? With that mind-set, why should I believe this new
foo thing is any better?"

That, if anything, should be a cogent argument for a valid homepage.

> 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.

It embarrasses me when I tell people how wonderful GNOME is and how
unlike certain other platforms it sticks to open standards and stuff,
when I know perfectly well that its main page doesn't. 
 
> 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.)

Agreed, Bobby is picky. So is htmltidy (which demands summary attributes
for any table). 

But so, I hear, is gcc with the pedantic flag. 

Anyway, I know there was a GUADEC BOF about the site. Perhaps someone 
could summarise or point me at a url about it? (There's nothing in the
gnome-web-list archives referring to what happened at the BOF yet.)

Telsa