Reading through the archive of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) News in 2004 feels a little like perusing the legal notices in the back of the newspaper. There’s some stuff in there that might be important, but it mostly looks like some useless black newsprint on wrinkled white paper.

If you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to miss news like an update to the W3C Markup Validator. The program is easier to use, and has much better explanations for some of the errors that it pinpoints than it did in the past.

Why validate?

There are at least two or three good reasons:

1. One is that validation makes it more likely that your pages will look good in more than just one browser;

2. Another is that it is more likely that those pages are accessible to a wider audience; and,

3. It is possible that those pages will be better liked by robots and programs which index the web, and look for well formed semantic markup, so they can allocate a relevance weight to headlines, bold and italics text, page titles, and other specially marked-up parts of a page.

I like to look at a validation program as an extra pair of eyes that can catch mistakes I otherwise might miss.

That was really last week’s big news at the W3C. Did you miss it? It didn’t make the cover of the New York Times, or even catch a response or two in a post about it at the forums. But, it’s worth talking about.

It is part of a move to try to rewrite some of the information at the W3C so that it is easier to read and understand. Here are three aspects of that which we saw this week from the consortium (I like calling them that - it makes them sound like a world-wide organization made of of important industry players who set standards affecting the whole world wide web - which is what they are):

1. Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Specifying the language of content 1.0

2. Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Characters and Encodings 1.0

3. Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Handling Bidirectional Text 1.0

If you write pages for an international audience, and might be using more than one language in your pages, there’s a good chance that you might want to read those.

If you want to make sure that Google and other search engines recognize that your page is written for an English speaking audience, or a French speaking audience, or German. or whatever, you should probably at least look at the first one, and maybe the second one.

If you can translate the W3C Language into English, that is. You can notice that they have tried to make some efforts to shape the language of their releases in a more accessible manner to a wider audience. Their attempts still need some work.

A part of a project that looks at such issues can sometimes come under the title of Quality Assurance (QA). Interestingly, the W3C has a new working draft of their own The QA handbook. If you find yourself getting excited over a chance to look at “the process and operational aspects of the quality practices of W3C’s Working Groups (WG),” this is the document for you. It is:

…intended for Working Group chairs and team contacts, to help them to avoid known pitfalls and to benefit from experiences gathered from the W3C Working Groups themselves. It provides techniques, tools, and templates that should facilitate and accelerate the work of the WGs.

If you’ve ever worked upon a very large project involving many people, and a fair amount of time, and faced a need to come to compromises, and to rework some aspects of the project, you might appreciate the efforts of people involved in QA.

Anther working draft, involving something known as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2 was also released this week. I have the sense that this stuff could be powerful and useful, but I really need more pictures and examples. I don’t understand much of the working draft. It’s definitely calling for a heavily illustrated, easy language guide. The W3C really needs some tech-savvy copy writers with lots of spare time on their hands, and a desire to help teach the world to build web pages.

That’s what is up with the W3C. That was fun. I’m going to go read the legal notices now.