What is "validation"?

Terje Bless wrote:

> >The definition of what's approvable is not made clear by the site. (I
> >haven't made a research project out of this.) But I believe you're not
> >correct -- I think it's more than adherence to the DTD, since e.g.
> >!DOCTYPE is required. (Correct me if I'm mistaken.)
>
> I'm not sure I understand this paragraph fully.
>
> The DOCTYPE needs to be present because that is what specifies which DTD
> should be used to interpret this document. The DOCTYPE can reference any
> DTD; including several that have not been specified by the W3C. The DOCTYPE
> can even reference your own DTD using a URL and the SGML parser that the
> Validator uses can fetch it from your site and validate the pages against
> that DTD.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but none of the various HTML 4 DTD's requires a
!DOCTYPE in the document. Ergo, the validator can flunk documents that are
consistent with an HTML 4 DTD. Ergo, the validator requires more than merely
adherence to an HTML 4 DTD.

How much more? It checks for !DOCTYPE; does it enforce anything else as well? I
don't believe the site documents exactly what the validator is checking for.

--
http://www.urielw.com/

Received on Wednesday, 6 October 1999 10:06:37 UTC