Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 05/08/06 00:05

"Albert Wiersch" <donotreply@123donotreply123.com> wrote:

> And what is wrong with notifying web developers, should they choose, that
> the typeface they requested the browser to display may not be available
> on a significant number of systems?

If they wanted to know that, there would surely be better sources than a
subjective checker that claims to be a validator to sell better, especially
when the said checker's author apparently has no idea of the real problems
with fonts. It would be foolish to report rarely available fonts in a list
appearing as the value of font-family as being erroneous or dubitable. The
real problems arise when a suggested font _is_ available...

> And CSE HTML Validator doesn't purport to find problems, it actually does
> find them...

We've seen your advertizing before, and we've seen that you don't have much
to say to arguments that point out that you have just invented "problems" and
then proudly present your product as a valuable tool for finding them.
To confuse people more, you list them in the midst of real problems and their
detection which _would_ be useful _if_ your checker distinguished between
facts and your fiction. Given that your checker warns about harmless spaces
and makes a noise about meta description tags as if they were needed, its
potentially useful messages lose their value. Besides, presenting the
checking of URL syntax (which checking is almost surely flawed - URL syntax
is very tricky to handle properly) as a great benefit is disproprotionate;
it's of little use to check the syntax only, when there are quite useful (and
free) _link checkers_.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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