- From: Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor <roconnor@wronski.math.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 10:00:41 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-html@w3.org
On 22 Apr 1998, Peter Flynn wrote:
> I just finished version 1.0.0 of a Java program designed to check the
> attribues of an HTML document against the HTML 4.0 specs. It only checks
> those attribues which can't be validated entirely by nsgmls.
>
> nsgmls always validates all attributes. I don't see how there
> is anything else to write.
>
> Unless you mean _semantic_ validation...but that's outside the scope
> of HTML, it belongs to the browser.
Section 19.1 of the HTML 4.0 specs explains nicely how a DTD can't fully
express the HTML 4.0 specifications. What my program does in ensure that
attribute values are correct.
``Although the specification restricts the value for [the width attribute
of IMG] to an "integer representing a length in pixels," the DTD only
defines it to be CDATA, which actually allows any value. Only a
specialized program could capture the complete specification of HTML
4.0.''
My program is such a specialized program. It doesn't capture the complete
specification of HTML 4.0, but it captures more than the DTD alone can
give.
--
Russell O'Connor roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
<URL:http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eroconnor/>
"And truth irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message"
-- Anindita Dutta, "The Paradox of Truth, the Truth of Entropy"
Received on Wednesday, 22 April 1998 10:00:44 UTC