[Bug 27818] New: Very confusing messages if malformed comment or stray BODY element encountered in HEAD

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=27818

            Bug ID: 27818
           Summary: Very confusing messages if malformed comment or stray
                    BODY element encountered in HEAD
           Product: Validator
           Version: HEAD
          Hardware: PC
                OS: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML5
          Assignee: mike+validator@w3.org
          Reporter: mark.rogers@powermapper.com
        QA Contact: www-validator-cvs@w3.org

1) Very confusing error messages if malformed comment encountered in HEAD

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<-- malformed comment -->
<meta name="description" content="blah" >
</head>

The first part of the message is ok, though the suggested fix isn't:
"Bad character - after <. Probable cause: Unescaped <. Try escaping it as
&lt;."

After that things get very confusing since the malformed comment is interpreted
as the start of the BODY, and following messages are emitted:

"Element meta is missing one or more of the following attributes: itemprop,
property."
"Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point."

2) It's even more confusing if HEAD contains a stray BODY element added by
accident:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<br>
<meta name="description" content="blah" >
</head>

The first error is 
"Attribute name not allowed on element meta at this point."

Took me a while to figure out (even with source code) since the error can be
some distance from the trigger element, and the trigger element can be very
hard to spot.

I guess error recovery on the malformed comment might be possible. The second
one looks much harder to fix due to tag omission rules.

Best Regards
Mark

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Received on Tuesday, 13 January 2015 08:33:32 UTC