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
