RE: Bug in validator with HTML 4 documents that are towards at XHTML compliance
From: Brian Gilkison (gilkison@one.net)
Date: Wed, Feb 02 2000
From: "Brian Gilkison" <gilkison@one.net>
To: <www-validator@w3.org>
Cc: <marc@kalle.yodanet.schwaebischhall.de>
Message-ID: <NABBLPCLGCEADCFDBEICKELHCFAA.gilkison@one.net>
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 02:12:31 -0500
Subject: RE: Bug in validator with HTML 4 documents that are towards at XHTML compliance
Marc A. Donges said:
> I recently tried to make my documents, which complied with HTML 4.0
> Transitional, as compatible with XHTML 1.0 as possible (whithout
> switching the DTD yet).
>
> So I edited the documents for XML wellformedness. I converted "<HR>" to
> "<hr />", which was OK for the validator. When changing a "<LINK [...]>"
> element to "<link [...] />", the HTML-validator started reporting errors.
I think the problem (and others will correct me if I'm wrong) is that a
document can't be both HTML4 AND XHTML1 compliant at the same time. My
interpretation has been that the backwards-compatibility tags -- converting
<HR>, for example, into
<hr /> -- is for backwards compatibility with exisiting user-agents (i.e.
browsers, etc.).
The clue to me is that you stated you had changed the DOCTYPE in your code
yet; if you look at the parse tree from the sample URL you gave, you'll
notice that after your <link> statement, there are two <BODY> tags. I'd
assume that the closing ' />' on the <link>, combined with and HTML 4
DOCTYPE, is what's causing the problem. Switch the DOCTYPE to XHTML and
re-run the validator.
Brian Gilkison
gilkison@one.net