RE: Possible bug in CSS Validator

You note below that the URL in the first instance is
"images/Richland_College.jpg;",

However, it is my understanding that the semicolon is a reserved character.
Therefore, for this to have been a valid URL it would have to have had the
semicolon encoded. See http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1738.html, Section 2.2.
It notes:

------
Thus, only alphanumerics, the special characters "$-_.+!*'(),", and reserved
characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a
URL.
------

If that is the case, then the first scenario is not correct. The URL cannot
end in a semicolon, so it would be an error in semantics that the validator
should pick up (at a minimum, as a warning). This is something that I could
see someone spending hours trying to correct why the image doesn't show
without realizing the problem where a simple warning from the validator
would save hours of frustration. I can't imagine anyone naming a file with a
semicolon as the last character in the filename, so it seems fairly obvious
that this was intended to go outside of the parentheses as a terminator, not
inside as a part of the URL.

--Doug



On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 11:12 PM, James Link <JLink@dcccd.edu> wrote:
> To the CSS Validator folks:
> Both of these declarations validate in the CSS validator:
> body {background-color:#00FF00; 
> background-image:url(images/Richland_College.jpg;)}

This is valid: the url is "images/Richland_College.jpg;", and there is no
optional semicolon used to end the statement.

> body {background-color:#00FF00; 
> background-image:url(images/Richland_College.jpg);}

This is valid: the url is "images/Richland_College.jpg", and there is an
optional semicolon used to end the statement.

Received on Friday, 19 February 2010 18:06:18 UTC