Re: Reporting a Validator bug

Thanks for your detailed response.  I take it then, that there is in fact a bug in Validator.

Your suggestion to use images to simplify the code might make it look neater but adding hundreds of images, one for each line, would make loading impossibly slow.  These pages are put up for people to use and speed of execution trumps coding convenience every time.

Where are the vertical and horizontal tabbing we need, both relative and absolute?  It would have been nice if the designers of this brain dead language we're all stuck with, and/or their successors who formalized and extended it, had bothered to learn something about typesetting, or even typewriting, before they turned it loose on the world.

I have eliminated all use of non-standard character entities, and converted ">"s to the standard character entity ">".

I have also dropped those "px"s, which were put in at an early stage when I was still sorting out the differences between CSS and HTML.  I have left the line

  <a>Last updated 14May2009<br />&copy; John Barrett Robb</a>

as it is, even though it has no "href", "id", or "name" components, because I don't need them.  I am using <a> to frame this text beccause <p> forces a line break, and I want this text to appear on the same lines as the images.  There may be another way to accomplish that, but the present code doesn't violate Strict XHTML as far as I can say, nor does it even generate a warning when I run Validator.  Neither, for that matter, do those superfluous "px"s and I wonder how you came up with warning messages for this?

As for these items

  LINE 671 The "disable_script" element is not a recognized element. Is it misspelled?
  LINE 683 The "disable_script" element is not a recognized element. Is it misspelled?

there is no such text in my file, which is also only 600 lines long.

The final elements in all my pages are a block of Statcounter javascript code which is supposed to be XHTML compliant, and maybe these erroneous messages were generated because of embedded tricks.  This code also generates not so much as a warning when I run it through Validator.  In any case I tried eliminating it entirely, and rerunning Validator against the cleaned up file, but it still times out.

John Robb


----- Original Message ----- 
From: Debbie Mitchell 
To: www-validator@w3.org 
Cc: John B. Robb 
Sent: Friday, April 16, 2010 9:10 PM
Subject: Re: Reporting a Validator bug



Yes it error-ed out on me as well
 Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, [no address given] and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything
you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.9 (Debian) mod_python/3.3.1 Python/2.5.2 Server at validator.w3.org Port 80





There are some errors in your html though:

You could look at defining styles and using background images for the spaces and lines required
you could do this with paragraph classes.  OR create images and left align them at the top of the paragraph


Errors I found

LINE  2  The natural primary language of a document should be identified. Consider using the "lang" and/or (for XHTML)
"xml:lang" attributes with the "html" tag to specify the language. For example, lang="en" for English or lang="fr" for
French. Note that the language may also be specified by the web server through HTTP headers in which case checkpoint 4.3
would be satisfied without the "lang" or "xml:lang" attributes.
 
LINE 68 [HTML Tidy] replacing invalid numeric character reference 133
LINE 68 Found an invalid character reference ".". Characters between 128 and 159 (inclusive) are typically Microsoft
specific and are reserved for control characters in the standard Internet character sets. They are undefined in HTML and
illegal in XHTML. Therefore they should not be used in HTML/XHTML documents. Consider using "." instead. If, for some
reason, you still want to use character references 128-159, then you can set an option to allow them in the Validator
Engine Options.

LINE  78 Found the character '>' with no previous character '<' to open the tag. The character '<' must appear before
each '>' to open a tag. If you actually want to use this character in the text portion of your document, then use the
character entity reference ">". Note, however, that using this reference is not technically necessary according to the
HTML specification (but it is highly recommended that you use it).

LINE 78 Found the character '>' with no previous character '<' to open the tag. The character '<' must appear before
each '>' to open a tag. If you actually want to use this character in the text portion of your document, then use the
character entity reference ">". Note, however, that using this reference is not technically necessary according to the
HTML specification (but it is highly recommended that you use it).

LINE 663 An "href", "id", or "name" attribute should normally be used with this "a" tag. If one of these attributes is
being set with a script, then consider the accessibility issues of requiring scripting. Disable this message if you do
not want to check for this.

LINE 664 The attribute value "31px" for "height" contains the CSS unit "px". CSS units should only be used where CSS
syntax may be used. CSS syntax may not be used here. Try removing the "px".
 
LINE 671 The "disable_script" element is not a recognized element. Is it misspelled?
LINE 683 The "disable_script" element is not a recognized element. Is it misspelled?
LINE 691 [7] The "height" and "width" attributes should be used with the "img" element. Using these attributes
generally result in faster and smoother (less jumpy) rendering. Using them is also considered to be good style. 

---------- Original Message ----------- 
 From: "John B. Robb" <johnbrobb@verizon.net> 
 To: <www-validator@w3.org> 
 Sent: Fri, 16 Apr 2010 08:17:15 -0400 
 Subject: Reporting a Validator bug

> I have a webpage (attached) with an extremely simple structure which the W3C Validator chokes on. It is coded in
strict XHTML and I can get it validated clean if I break it up into small pieces. It is unusual only in that it
contains a large number of "&nbsp;"s, which I need to control the exact spacing of an indented genealogical tree chart
(presented like an indented outline). Any suggestions would be appreciated. 
> 
> John Robb 
------- End of Original Message -------