Re: Suggestion for Change in HTML Validatior

On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, David M Abrahamson wrote:

> Hello again,
> 
> Just checking to see if you had any thoughts on my suggestion
> of January 8th for a small change in the validator to check for
> invalid HREFs of the form <A HREF="url:http://www.xyz.com">.

That is of course a somewhat useful check, as are a whole host of
similar checks on the content of an attribute.

However, it is not, nor can be, part of formal HTML validation to
a DTD, which is the purpose of the W3C validator.  It belongs in a
different tool.

A current theme of my work is to extend the concept of validation
by hacking on DTDs to provide useful additional checks (see
"Validating for Accessibility" in the archives of this list).
Some such tools are available at the Site Valet:

  * Page Valet, with all its options unchecked, is exactly equivalent
    to the W3C validator (it will report exactly the same things as
    errors, though the actual error messages may differ).  Several
    options are provided for additional checks.
  * Likewise, Code Valet will do straight validation, but instead
    of a fixed menu of additional checks (i.e. imposing my ideas
    on you) it lets you hack your own directly, with James Clark's
    options to SP, and (still more powerfully) SGML architectural forms.

So if you want to hack this up, your contribution will be welcome
and can be tested using existing tools.

Having said that, even syntactic checking of URLs is of relatively
little use: it is better for a repair tool to seek to follow the
link and report on the outcome.  Site Valet already does that.

-- 
Nick Kew

Received on Wednesday, 31 January 2001 06:52:25 UTC