mpt sticks to his guns.

mpt sticks to his guns.

After about an hour of thinking on the matter mpt has concluded that the lack of visible UI for w3c validation in the Browser is, yes, you guessed it, a bigger _usability_ concern for most Mozilla users than having to locate and install plug ins in order for pages to display as intended by the page author. And his conclusion was based on a usability study? A polling of user complaints in the Mozilla forums like the newsgroups or MozillaZine? A quick poll of users at the coffee shop where he works? Nope. None of the above. His conclusion was based on a certain number of open bugs on Flash and Tech Evangelism components in Bugzilla (note that he mentions only flash problems and conveniently ignores the 246 other open plug in bugs. But I forgive him because I happen to think that bug counts aren't the be all and end all of usability data even if there are 97 duplicates of this one flash bug) Good to see he's making his usability commandments based on a couple of narrow Bugzilla queries. I guess that validates all of those Mozilla contributors that make the similar "if there are a lot of people complaining loud enough in Bugzilla then we should add some UI for it" demands.

All kidding aside, maybe it's just really hard for mpt to admit that he was wrong. I don't have any usability data to back up my claim either but it seems pretty obvious to me that determining that the lack of a plug in is the reason the page doesn't display, locating the correct plug in, installing the plug in and returning to the page to finally view its content is a usability problem while not seeing a little smiley pop up whenever a page validates against a w3c syntax checking mechanism is precedent behavior that will be completely acceptable to the overwhelming majority of Mozilla Browser users.

Let's take a minute (no need to spend an hour thinking about it) to walk down a hypothetical little path. Let's suppose you hand a Mozilla install to Joe B. User and tell him that it doesn't display large chunks of content at many prominent web sites. Then you tell him that he may be able to correct this. To do so he has to figure out which plug ins he needs, figure out where to get them and figure out how to install any or all of flash, real, wmp, quicktime, and more. Then you tell him that to make up for that pain you have generously included a little bit of UI in the status area of the browser, a smiley that pops up whenever a page validates against the w3c HTML and CSS syntax checking mechanisms. Then let's say you walk away leaving Mr. User to figure out how to make Mozilla work.

Wow. I'm convinced. I didn't think I would be but after taking this minute to think about it I'm definitely in agreement with mpt. We have got to focus on this validation notification in the status area . Never mind that (in mpt's words) "There aren't many pages out there that validate." It's clearly a real usability problem not having this feature and we can't go another day until we make it much easier for end users to test documents like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards. Who needs plug ins to work and be easy to setup anyway. Why make them easy to install when we can educate all the end users in the world about CSS2, XHTML, XForms, Character Encoding, the Document Object Model and MathML. It's not like there are any prominent pages that won't display content without plug ins but users can't even begin to browser without validation notification. End users have been begging for validation UI for far too long and it's time we give them what they so emphatically demand.

Wait, maybe not. Maybe as mpt says in the bug requesting this feature:

I don't think it's Mozilla's job to be a detailed validator, as
well as a browser. There are plenty of perfectly good validators on the Web
already. And the Mozilla validator will become useless as pages begin to be
written in HTML 5.0 or 6.0 (unless you download, cache, and use the DTD from the
address given in the !DOCTYPE ...).

Maybe it is a bad idea and it would never work well in practice and users wouldn't need or want or even notice this feature. Maybe we shouldn't geek out our browser just because the feature happened to get good reviews on some Mac browser with even less marketshare than Mozilla M14. Maybe it's just not that important and there are lots of actual usability issues that are more important than this web developer feature request.

Oh, and tabbed browsing is bad too.