Re: Question regarding HTML validation

On Fri, Sep 15, 2006 at 04:37:05PM -0000, ktsiara@otenet.gr wrote:

> we need to make our site XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant and CSS 2
> compaliant.

> Our customer suggests another HTML validator tool because they claim
> that the W3C Validator is not very strict when validating HTML
> content.

The W3C Validator has a few bugs when it comes to XHTML, but those are
fairly unusual edge cases.

> The name of this tool is CSE HTML Validator.

The CSE HTML "Validator" isn't a validator, and lots of people appear
to have a low opinion of it.

http://groups.google.com/groups?lnk=hpsg&q=CSE+HTML+Validator

> An example follows. Suppose we first validate page.html with the W3C 
> online tool and the result says that it passes the validation, when 
> at the same time we validate the same document with CSE HTML 
> validator and presents us with different results (has some errors and 
> warnings). Can you please verify if we are XHTML 1.0 Transitional 
> compliant if we only use your validation tool,

The only bug I've seen in the Markup Validator Service (with real
world XHTML data) hits when attributes are not seperated with spaces
(e.g. foo="foo"baz="baz"). This is documented (IIRC there is a link
from the XHTML validation results page).

Valid doesn't mean compliant though (the term means compliant with the
DTD, but the specification expresses further contstraints in prose).

I doubt any automated tool can guarantee compliance, for example: "Do
not specify irrelevant alternate text when including images intended
to format a page". An automated check of this would require the
software to know what the author's intention was when they added the
image to the page.

-- 
David Dorward                                      http://dorward.me.uk

Received on Saturday, 16 September 2006 01:16:58 UTC