{"id":37,"date":"2002-09-05T23:07:37-04:00","date_gmt":"2002-09-06T07:07:37+00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/wordpress\/?p=37"},"modified":"2002-09-05T23:07:37-04:00","modified_gmt":"2002-09-06T07:07:37+00:00","slug":"markup-validation-indicators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterjanes.ca\/blog\/2002\/09\/05\/markup-validation-indicators\/","title":{"rendered":"Markup validation indicators"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mozilla usability list<\/a> published by self-proclaimed usability weenie<\/q> Matthew Thomas (aka mpt) has been a hot<\/a> topic<\/a> recently<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

Not to be contrary–particularly against Ian, Asa and Blake–but I think I’m with mpt on this one, though not exactly for his reasons. Mozilla<\/a> is a developer tool<\/em>, and so should have features for developers. According to the 1.0 release notes<\/a>, Mozilla-the-platform is targeted at the developer community,<\/q> and it’s up to third parties (like, say, Netscape<\/a>) to take the codebase and customize it for a consumer audience. (I do debate classifying several of mpt’s items as usability issues–from an application perspective they’re clearly features, but from a future-of-the-web perspective they’re usability.)<\/p>\n\n

I’d love to use a browser that makes the validation status of a page user-visible, because I want to use it to develop my pages<\/em>. I don’t care about anyone else’s. The indicator doesn’t need to list the errors–the W3C validator<\/a> and other tools will do a better job, as Asa argues–but it indicates<\/em> that there’s a problem, which is what an indicator<\/em> is supposed to do. It should do the same for any<\/em> content type Mozilla can display. Arguing against having it in Mozilla because end users won’t like it<\/a> doesn’t fly–end users don’t care about the DOM Inspector<\/a> or Venkman<\/a> (the JavaScript debugger) either, but there they are. (I rarely use them myself, but that’s because I don’t write a lot of JS… yet.) At times, for similar reasons, I’m even on the side of those who argue that there shouldn’t be a quirks<\/q> (i.e. compatibility) mode in Mozilla (or IE)–providing such a feature<\/q> without an indicator just makes it harder to show page authors, software makers et al. that they’re creating bad code.<\/p>\n\n

(I’ve been looking for an article by mpt where he explains that he knows he’s been a real jerk<\/q> lately, but have had no luck–I’m caught in the Google gap<\/a>. Should have blogged it a couple of days ago when I read it. The point was that I tend to agree with what he’s said but not the way in which he’s said it.)<\/p>\n\n

Finally, lest it seem I’m a complete mpt apologist, I don’t like his weblog design–I find it’s hard to read and generally not aesthetically pleasing. (I’m going to echo his own criticism of Internet Explorer<\/a>: to me, his blog looks like a refugee freom Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory<\/q>. I’d almost go so far as to bemoan its usability. Almost.<\/p><\/div>

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