Re: w3.org site-wide markup review?

On 1 Feb 2011, at 10:13 AM, Danny Ayers wrote:

> On 1 February 2011 16:04, Ian Jacobs <[email protected]> wrote:
> ...
>> Still no plans for an external audit. (I don't think that's what  
>> Danny was
>> referring to; I understood Danny's comments to be about site QA.)
> ...
>
> I don't know what kind of audit was under discussion, but what I had
> in mind was a check of the markup of every current page on the site to
> see if it was of the highest machine-checkable standard possible
> (valid against specs, conforming to guidelines as well as best known
> practices). There may be exceptions with a handful of pages (e.g.
> historic, archived material, demonstrations of how not to do things),
> but in these cases there should be appropriate documentation and
> markup-corrected versions made available.

w3.org has a very large number of pages. I don't expect to fix all of  
them. I focus on the ones that are brought to my attention. We use  
some tools internally (and have used more historically, but less so  
now) to check for validity, for instance.

>
> I would expect the quality then to be maintained mechanically -
> checking frequently (i.e. polling) and/or passing new & modified pages
> through a quality filter before publication (event-driven).
>
> Whether or not these processes themselves should be subject to
> external review is probably a matter to leave until the current status
> is known.
>
> I'd leave content quality in the human-readable sense out of scope,
> left to the wisdom of the document editors and the crowd outside
> (because machine aren't very good at that sort of thing).
>
>> Another way to say this is: a site-wide review is not as  
>> interesting to me as fixing real problems that people encounter.
>
> That nicely captures the problem. An entirely reactive approach means
> there's always likely to be more broken than necessary.

I agree that a page might be broken and not reported. And tools help  
us catch some of those.

> For an
> organisation who's raison d'etre is to improve the Web, their Web
> presence should be as good as possible: "good enough" *isn't*. It goes
> down to credibility.

I agree that we have to maintain high standards on our site.  
Credibility will be derived from a number of factors. We don't have  
budget for all of them, alas.

Ian

>
> Cheers,
> Danny.
>
> -- 
> http://danny.ayers.name
>

--
Ian Jacobs ([email protected])    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447