A bug's life - bugs 3410 and the missing recurse/no recurse UI

Responding to some of the question marks in the “A bug’s life” post.

The “A bug’s life” poster wrote.

 3140 -> http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?text=%40import+%27foo%27%3B&usermedium=all&warning=1&profile=css21&usermedium=all. Seems to be an interesting bug to fix. Maybe a warning would be better than an error if the URL is not reachable

This is rather missing the point (but it turns out that so was I too). It’s only supposed to be parsing the CSS text, not _executing_ it, in some sense, surely? The validator must not issue a warning, as no-one told it to actually attempt to dereference any url. (Although it might want to invoke a URL-parser component as an additional benefit to the user?)

IMO this showstopper bug, 3410, should be made a priority, as we simply cannot use direct input mode to check @import _syntax_ at the moment.

The penny has just dropped with me. I noticed that in normal validate-by-url mode, as opposed to direct input mode, you can get the same error. But it’s not clear to me whether this is accident or design.

If “design”, then this needs to be cleaned up. Who told the css validator to also fetch and parse @import’ed stylesheets? Where’s the UI? Such a feature, if properly implemented, it would be extremely useful, but surely it has to be a selectable _option_ to recurse or not recurse?


Cecil Ward.

Received on Thursday, 19 July 2007 12:41:54 UTC