Re: validator.w3.org and XHTML

Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> Opera got a bug report today regarding a page that has a text/html 
> media type, XHTML 1.0 DOCTYPE and all, and uses <title/> rather than 
> <title></title> (incorrect per Appendix C if memory serves me right).
Appendix C is informative, and the working group have been very clear 
that it is a set of guidelines for authors to think about and not a set 
of conformance requirements. It's one of the reasons that I've 
considered XHTML as text/html to be something of a joke for some years now.

There is an experimental Appendix C checker in play at 
http://qa-dev.w3.org/appc/ - I don't know what stage of development it 
is at, but I believe the idea is to have it as part of a general test 
suite (unicorn) which incorporates various QA tests (including the 
validator).

Unfortunately, the amount of investment in the QA tools is very low, and 
most of the work is done by volunteers, so progress is quite slow.

It should be noted that Appendix C is likely to be superseded by 
http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2008/ED-xhtml-media-types-20081126/ when it is 
finished (and that should be very, very soon, but not before " It 
contains no absolute requirements, and should NEVER be used as the basis 
for creating conformance nor validation rules of any sort. Period." is 
changed, since it can easily be interested in such a way to forbid 
writing a QA tool based on it).
> Per HTML5 and for security reasons (reparsing causes issues in face of 
> injected scripts and all) we show a blank page.
TBH, since HTML5 is throwing out the idea of HTML being an SGML 
application, I'm surprised the parsing rules don't follow XML for <foo />.


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

Received on Monday, 8 December 2008 12:18:09 UTC