RE: Error Message Feedback

 
> 1. At one place, I am using JavaScript to place some HTML in 
> the document. 
> However, the validator ignores the fact that the quotes need 
> to be escaped 
> or that I am not placing HTML inside a script tag as such, 
> but rather into a 
> variable...


This was discussed last week - technically it's incorrect to have the
closing angle bracket inside your javascript string. You could
reasonably use the decimal character entity < instead. Many people
now enclose script blocks in CDATA sections, i.e.
http://www.w3schools.com/xml/xml_cdata.asp

<![CDATA[
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
function foo() {

}
</script>
]]>

 
> 2. The code I have written has &amp; in all links and this is 
> what displays 
> in view page source.  However, the validator somehow picks up 
> an additional 
> hidden pass through with a PHP session id.  As this is not 


PHP will auto append session IDs to URLs (also form actions and other
elements) if no cookie is sent by the user agent, I expect the validator
doesn't accept or return session cookies sent in the HTTP header. 

You may wish turn off session.use_trans_sid in your php.ini or in an
.htaccess file or your core page generation script if this is important
to you. 

A better solution is to tell PHP to use XHTML compatible argmuent
separators (it's actually a bug in PHP's default setting on some
versions). To do that, arg_separator.output  needs to be set to &amp;
not the default & character.

http://uk.php.net/session contains details of the config available to
control PHP's transparent session handling, in particular
url_rewriter.tags will be of interest to you.

See this doc for a discussion of this behaviour :
http://www.mtdev.com/2002/06/why-you-should-disable-phps-session-use_tra
ns_sid/


> visible under 
> view source and the code writer has no control over how php 
> places its 
> session variables in links, is it right for a document to 
> fail validation on 
> these grounds?


If what the validator sees is invalid, then yes, of course. 

You're not sending it what "normal" user agents would see, so the
problem really is yours not the validator. It can't be expected to
determine "OK this is PHP and has appended session IDs to the HTML
links, so I'll ignore that". It's required to be *strict* or it wouldn't
be of use to anybody ;-)


HTH
Cheers - Neil


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Received on Tuesday, 8 August 2006 08:53:46 UTC