- From: R.W. Crowl <silvermaplesoft@earthlink.net>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 04:03:38 -0400
- To: <www-validator@w3.org>
Somehow my mailer garbled my message. Here is what it should have looked like: http://home.earthlink.net/~silvermaplesoft/demos/embed.html Perhaps this trimmed down page will satisfy both Michael Adams and Frank Ellerman, who wrote: > It's an idea for XHTML and XML, but for HTML it's less > obvious what "next element" means after an unknown tag. > And for XHTML, if you have <dig> ... </div>, "next" > could be the end of file, because there is no </dig>. With the correct </div> instead of the </dig> in this example, there are only ten errors -- the nine I have labeled as useless and lastly the real error of a non-extant tag. The </dig> introduces three additional errors. Revalidating as either 4.01 strict or transitional produces the expected errors about XHTML issues but otherwise changes nothing. In all scenarios, parsing appears to resume perfectly adequately with <div id="main">. And while HTML can get away without closing some tags, the parser seems to have an adequate idea of what "next element" means. As a former compiler writer (USAF ADA contract), I am well aware of the difficulties of error recovery. But I fail to understand how ignoring the attributes of an element could possibly affect the parse stream. Either way it must find a closing ">" to the element and then continue parsing. As it reads the attributes it knows they are invalid precisely because it already knows the element is invalid and all it's really doing is looking for that bloody ">" so it can get on with the show. Does this clarify/simplify the issue? R. W. Crowl
Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2008 08:05:45 UTC