Caution Regarding the use of CAST's "bobby"

Sam Lanfranco (mailto:Lanfran@BELLANET.ORG)
Tue, 6 Oct 1998 11:27:43 -0400 

Message-ID:  <361A36EE.7A8F6F9B@bellanet.org>
Date:         Tue, 6 Oct 1998 11:27:43 -0400
From: Sam Lanfranco <mailto:Lanfran@BELLANET.ORG>
Subject:      Caution Regarding the use of CAST's "bobby"
To: mailto:DEVEL-L@AMERICAN.EDU


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The bobby software at http://www.cast.org/bobby needs to be
used with caution, recognizing it for what it is. It looks
at very specific properties of a home page and makes
suggestions about the relationship between the format of the


page (tables, alternative text tags, etc.) and access. It
makes
standard recommendations about good format. It also gives
useful information about access times for a well funcioning
page.


However, it cannot tell if the page is functioning well or
not. I have run it on the web page of a UN agency that
currently returns an error message of "FORBIDDEN ACCESS" for


all of the links from the home page, and displays none of
the intended gifs. Bobby caught none of this and showed
excellent response times - since the FORBIDDEN ACCESS
message is only 14k -. In other words, a completely
disfunctional web page came close to being awarded a Bobby
seal of approval. Tweeking a few format commands and the
page would have passed with flying colours, while still
being completely disfunctional.


Bobby is excellent for fine tuning access characteristics on


an otherwise good page, but it is a long way from an ISO9000


ertificate of quality assurance for the functionality of the
page
itself - and has nothing to say, of course, about content.


Sam Lanfranco
Bellanet


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