RE: Bug in validator with HTML 4 documents that are towards at XHTML compliance

Marc A. Donges said:
> I recently tried to make my documents, which complied with HTML 4.0
> Transitional, as compatible with XHTML 1.0 as possible (whithout
> switching the DTD yet).
>
> So I edited the documents for XML wellformedness.  I converted "<HR>" to
> "<hr />", which was OK for the validator. When changing a "<LINK [...]>"
> element to "<link [...] />", the HTML-validator started reporting errors.

I think the problem (and others will correct me if I'm wrong) is that a
document can't be both HTML4 AND XHTML1 compliant at the same time.  My
interpretation has been that the backwards-compatibility tags -- converting
<HR>, for example, into
<hr /> -- is for backwards compatibility with exisiting user-agents (i.e.
browsers, etc.).

The clue to me is that you stated you had changed the DOCTYPE in your code
yet; if you look at the parse tree from the sample URL you gave, you'll
notice that after your <link> statement, there are two <BODY> tags.  I'd
assume that the closing ' />' on the <link>, combined with and HTML 4
DOCTYPE, is what's causing the problem.  Switch the DOCTYPE to XHTML and
re-run the validator.

Brian Gilkison
gilkison@one.net

Received on Wednesday, 2 February 2000 02:12:53 UTC