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Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)

From: John Britsios
Date: Sat, Oct 25 2003 5:46PM
Subject: HTML Validator and CythiaSays
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Hallo!

Watching the discussion here, I though to make my comments.

I use the CSE HTML Pro Validator, and I am so satisfied, that I resell it myself.
You can download on my brandwith costs and test it for free:
http://www.webnauts.net/cse_validator.html

By the way for your info, if you did not know, CynthiaSays offers her desktop
software for $29,- instead of $99,- to clients who have any Bobby Desktop
version: http://www.cynthiasays.com/

And I am planning to purchase next week. I am pretty sure that it is a great
validator.

If you are interested in using a great freeware verifier, you might would like
to check A-Prompt: http://aprompt.snow.utoronto.ca/

My kindest regards,

John S. Britsios
Web Accessibility and Usab

From: Karl Groves
Date: Mon, Oct 27 2003 6:50AM
Subject: RE: HTML Validator and CythiaSays
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As Jukka already pointed out, the CSE "validator" is not a validator, it is a linter.
It also has a bad habit of displaying false warnings.

Validation for validation's sake is a pointless exercise. Its kind of like someone putting "table" as their table summary because Bobby tells them they need a table summary. ;-)

Submitting a page through a validator should be part of a process of quality assurance - i.e. checking to see if you've forgotten anything, messed up your nesting, misspelled an element or attribute, etc. For these purposes, the W3C or WDG validators are just fine.

Karl L. Groves, Certified Master CIW Designer
E-Commerce Manager
NASA Federal Credit Union
500 Prince Georges Blvd.
Upper Marlboro, MD 20774

301-249-1800 ext.497
Fax: 301-390-4531

Opinions expressed in this e-mail represent only myself and are not in any way to be taken as the words or opinions of my employer.

From: John Britsios
Date: Thu, Oct 30 2003 1:54PM
Subject: Re: HTML Validator and CythiaSays
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For most people, CSE HTML Validator is better than the W3C or WDG validators as it checks more and finds more potential problems. It's also easier to use. With one check, it is checking HTML syntax, CSS syntax, spelling, and hyperlinks.

See http://www.htmlvalidator.com/htmlval/whycseisbetter.html

John
----- Original Message -----
From: Karl Groves
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Sent: Monday, October 27, 2003 2:45 PM
Subject: RE: HTML Validator and CythiaSays


As Jukka already pointed out, the CSE "validator" is not a validator, it is a linter.
It also has a bad habit of displaying false warnings.

Validation for validation's sake is a pointless exercise. Its kind of like someone putting "table" as their table summary because Bobby tells them they need a table summary. ;-)

Submitting a page through a validator should be part of a process of quality assurance - i.e. checking to see if you've forgotten anything, messed up your nesting, misspelled an element or attribute, etc. For these purposes, the W3C or WDG validators are just fine.

Karl L. Groves, Certified Master CIW Designer
E-Commerce Manager
NASA Federal Credit Union
500 Prince Georges Blvd.
Upper Marlboro, MD 20774

301-249-1800 ext.497
Fax: 301-390-4531

Opinions expressed in this e-mail represent only myself and are not in any way to be taken as the words or opinions of my employer.

From: Karl Groves
Date: Thu, Oct 30 2003 2:23PM
Subject: RE: HTML Validator and CythiaSays
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The mere fact that CSE calls itself an HTML validator is misleading. The word "valid" has a very specific meaning, and the CSE product does not Validate.
It's advertised and sold as a validator while it clearly *does not and cannot* validate. It declares pages with serious errors to be 'valid'
and valid pages to have serious 'errors'.

VALIDATION
"The process of evaluating a system or component during or at the end of
the development process to determine whether it satisfies specified
requirements."

CSE does not validate. An HTML validator would mark as pass/fail against the document's specified DTD. CSE doesn't even use a DTD to check against, so how can it validate?

http://webtips.dan.info/validators.html


Karl L. Groves, Certified Master CIW Designer
E-Commerce Manager
NASA Federal Credit Union
500 Prince Georges Blvd.
Upper Marlboro, MD 20774

301-249-1800 ext.497
Fax: 301-390-4531

Opinions expressed in this e-mail represent only myself and are not in any way to be taken as the words or opinions of my employer.

From: John Britsios
Date: Thu, Oct 30 2003 7:01PM
Subject: Re: HTML Validator and CythiaSays
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I also wanted to say that there is more than one definition of the word validator. CSE HTML Validator has never sold itself as a "formal" DTD validator.
It is a validator in the common definition of the word, the definition that most people use.

John

----- Original Message -----
From: "Karl Groves" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: "John Britsios" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >; < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2003 10:19 PM
Subject: RE: HTML Validator and CythiaSays


> The mere fact that CSE calls itself an HTML validator is misleading. The word "valid" has a very specific meaning, and the CSE product does not Validate.
> It's advertised and sold as a validator while it clearly *does not and cannot* validate. It declares pages with serious errors to be 'valid'
> and valid pages to have serious 'errors'.
>
> VALIDATION
> "The process of evaluating a system or component during or at the end of
> the development process to determine whether it satisfies specified
> requirements."
>
> CSE does not validate. An HTML validator would mark as pass/fail against the document's specified DTD. CSE doesn't even use a DTD to check against, so how can it validate?
>
> http://webtips.dan.info/validators.html
>
>
> Karl L. Groves, Certified Master CIW Designer
> E-Commerce Manager
> NASA Federal Credit Union
> 500 Prince Georges Blvd.
> Upper Marlboro, MD 20774
>
> 301-249-1800 ext.497
> Fax: 301-390-4531
>
> Opinions expressed in this e-mail represent only myself and are not in any way to be taken as the words or opinions of my employer.
>
>
>

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Oct 30 2003 11:25PM
Subject: Re: HTML Validator and CythiaSays
← Previous message | No next message

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, John Britsios wrote:

> I also wanted to say that there is more than one definition of the word
> validator.

Surely. But in the context of SGML applications such as HTML, only one.

> CSE HTML Validator has never sold itself as a "formal" DTD validator.

That sounds like an ex-president not having had sex "formally".

> It is a validator in the common definition of the word, the definition
> that most people use.

What definition? Most people have no definition for that word. HTML
authors should know the definition that is relevant in the HTML context,
and if you are selling something as HTML validator that isn't a
validator, you are misleading them - in this context, for commercial
purposes. I understand well that the name "CSE HTML Validator" has
commercial value as a trademark. This does not make it less misleading.
(Besides, it's both less and more than a validator; a large part of
what it does doesn't really deal with markup syntax at all.)

"CSE HTML Validator" has many interesting features, and it could even be
useful in the hands of a very competent author who knows well the
limitations and errors of the software and uses it as tool with a very
critical mind.

But it is isn't useful to a novice, or to an author with little
experience, and it isn't a validator _even_ a very loose sense of the
word. Regarding accessibility, there can be no such thing as validator
even in the loose sense, a program that reports whether or not a document
satisfies some accessibility criteria (which is a meaning _quite_
different from a markup validator). An _invalidator_ is possible, i.e.
a program that is able to correctly report for some documents that a
document does not comply with some accessibility criteria,
but even that is difficult since the criteria themselves are so vague.

And in accessibility, "CSE HTML Validator" doesn't seem to do anything
that the free tools wouldn't do, except give some _wrong_ diagnostics.
Most accessibility checkers give wrong diagnostics among useful messages,
partly because the accessibility criteria weren't really designed for
automatic checkability (which is a good thing, since if they had been,
they would have a very narrow scope and limited impact on actual
accessibility).

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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