Re: Bug: DOCTYPE upeercase vs. lowercase

Greetings,

I'm afraid that the pros and cons of  SGML standards are way over my 
head.  My skills in HTML are very rudimentary thus my main objective was 
to find some online tools that I could use to check and verify the site 
pages that I have built with my limited knowledge.  I'm not sure what 
was going on with  Netscape 4.7 Composer but  I had a look at later 
versions of Netscape and the preferences associated with the Composer 
appear to be more flexible.  I also noticed that Netscape 6.2 and 7 
composers have a Validate HTML feature which takes users to the 3WC HTML 
Validation Service page.  This is the location with the validate and 
link test features that I had previously chosen to use.   I have 
down-loaded Netscape 7 and I had hoped that it would provide a good 
spellchecker and a "pretty print" formatter for my pages.  Again some 
shortcomings, the "pretty print" reformat feature (that supposedly was 
in Netscape 6.2) doesn't appear to be in Netscape 7.  As for the 
spellchecker , it still changes the document to lower case, even though 
it leaves the DOCTYPE  info in  uppercase!  I also noticed that it 
reformats some of the source HTML and rearranges the source page layout 
even with the preferences on the Composer set to "Retain original source 
formatting".

Thank you both for your replies.  I think that Ville made a valid point. 
I didn't try all the various combinations to see which doctype formats 
the 3WC validator would reject, but here are two (below) that it will 
accept .  I know that pages with either one of these formats validate 
okay. As you will notice both of these formats have some lower case 
elements in them. What should the "standard" be?  Who knows!! It is very 
confusing for "hobbyists" like myself. I will let greater minds debate 
the subtleties of  these and other issues.

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

Sincerely,

Kevin Reddigan

Ville Skyttä wrote:

>On Mon, 2002-11-11 at 03:13, Nick Kew wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>Can anyone tell me why the DOCTYPE etc. must be in UPPER CASE for the
>>>3WC validation?
>>>      
>>>
>>Because that's the SGML rules.  A validator that didn't complain when
>>presented with an invalid document wouldn't be much use.
>>    
>>
>
>Is it really so?  AFAIK in *SGML* document type declarations, the only
>case-sensitive part is the public identifier string..  In X(HT)ML, the
>case rules are a lot stricter(/better).  So all these would be equally
>valid (but I see no reason not to follow the XML doctype declaration
>rules, ie. the first or last of the following examples, depending on the
>case of the root "html" element, and appended with a system id):
>
><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
><!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
><!DocType hTmL pUBliC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
>
>Please prove me wrong, really!  I'd love to see good pointers to
>refererences where this is cleary spelled out in some (SGML) spec.
>
>So, IMO this is a limitation in the validator (and is already reported
>as a bug in the beta test).
>
>  
>
>>>I use Netscape spellchecker which changes all coding to lowercase
>>>      
>>>
>>That sounds like a serious bug.
>>    
>>
>
>Indeed.
>
>  
>

Received on Monday, 11 November 2002 19:09:53 UTC