- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Tue, 25 May 2004 20:25:55 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
On Tue, 25 May 2004, Liam Morland wrote: > I found that I think is a bug with the W3C HTML Validator. It is not a bug. > Consider this HTML fragment: > > <li<a href="file.html">File</a> > ^^ > > The <li> tag is not closed. It is implicitly closed by the tag that follows it (technically, by the tag open character "<"). > This is not raised as an issue with the W3C > Validator, but is is raised by the WDG Validator. It is an issue, but not a reportable markup error. The WDG validator gives, in addition to a validity report, some useful _warnings_. A warning is not an error. The warning is given because browsers generally do not support HTML as defined, regarding some issues like this, and the omission of tag close character ">" in HTML is virtually always a typo, not intentional. See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.3 which needs to be read so that "limited support" means "no support" in clause B.3.7 (and the explanation is effectively handwaving aimed at declaring lack of support acceptable). There has been much talk about making the W3C validator deviate from HTML rules in this respect. Eventually this will probably take place. The _proper_ method, of course, would be to define HTML 4.02 that has different _rules_, so that shorthand markup is not allowed. But nobody's really interested in improving HTML 4 definition, and in XHTML the problem has been replaced by quite different problems. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 25 May 2004 13:25:57 UTC