errors.html

From: Clemens Radl (clemens.radl@uni-tuebingen.de)
Date: Sun, Apr 15 2001

  • Next message: Terje Bless: "Re: errors.html" 

    Date: Sun, 15 Apr 2001 19:55:51 +0200 (CEST)
From: Clemens Radl <clemens.radl@uni-tuebingen.de>
To: www-validator@w3.org
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.21.0104151914580.17049-100000@hsmau1.histo.geschichtswissenschaft.uni-tuebingen.>
Subject: errors.html

Hi,

I have two minor suggestions for the validator errors page 
<http://validator.w3.org/docs/errors.html>:

1. Section about "general entity `FOO' not defined and no default entity"
<http://validator.w3.org/docs/errors.html#bad-entity>

I am referring to the problem with ampersands in URLs.  The error
explanation reads "The only way to get around this is for the author of
the CGI program to use a different value between arguments [...]".  

Another workaround is to use "&amp;" instead of '&' in URLs, as mentioned
in <http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/problems.html#amp>, which in
turn is linked to from <http://validator.w3.org/feedback.html>.

Maybe one should include this reference into the error messages page,
because this offers a chance for web authors to create valid _and_ working
documents.  Of course, it is nevertheless a good idea to ask maintainers
of cgi-programs to accept other separators besides '&'.


2. Section about "non SGML character number ###"
<http://validator.w3.org/docs/errors.html#bad-char>

"HTML uses the standard ISO8859-1 character encoding, and ISO8859-1 leaves
undefined 65 character codes (0 to 31 inclusive and 127 to 159
inclusive); The Validator has found one of these undefined characters in
your document."

This passage suggests that tabs (character code 9), line feeds (character
code 10) and carriage returns (character code 13) are not valid characters
to be used in an iso8859-1 encoded html document.  Of course, no one would
misunderstand this passage, but still it might be a good idea to indicate
more precisely which character codes are illegal.

By the way, I also think it is not quite correct to say that "ISO8859-1
leaves undefined" the character codes below 32.  I always thought that
iso8859-1 character codes below 128 were equivalent to ASCII.

Regards,

Clemens


--
Clemens Radl
Universitaet Tuebingen
Abteilung fuer mittelalterliche Geschichte
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/mittelalter/