- From: Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2000 17:30:37 -0500
- To: David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>
- Cc: Terje Bless <link@tss.no>, W3C Validator <www-validator@w3.org>
On Sun, Feb 20, 2000 at 11:22:54AM -0500, David Brownell wrote: > Terje Bless wrote: > > On 19.02.00 at 20:10, David Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net> wrote: > > >Basically, it accepts blank lines before XML/text declarations, which are > > >explicitly not permitted in the grammar: no whitespace before either of > > >those, and the same syntax elsewhere in the document body (e.g. after the > > >newline) counts as an illegal processing instruction : > ... the following isn't reported as a fatal error: > > Line 1: > Line 2: <?xml version="1.0"?> > Lines 3-N: irrelevant Thanks for the info, I added that as a test case: http://validator.w3.org/dev/tests/xhtml1-blank-1st-line.html > That malformed input is ignored, which is the problem. I didn't try any > related inputs to try to characterize the bug any further. > > It does make me wonder how many other illegal XML constructs are passing > through there. When I added the xhtml support recently, I intended for the output to include a "caveat" blurb linked to information on SP's XML limitations: http://www.jclark.com/sp/xml.htm but I messed it up and this caveat was only being included for (non-xhtml) XML validations, not XHTML. That's fixed now; all XHTML validations include a link to that description of SP's limitations. > > Well, in general, throwing fatal exceptions isn't really > > usefull behaviour for a validation tool. Is there some reason > > this should be changed in tis case? > > To report the error? Absolutely -- it's telling folk that seriously > broken XML is valid, when it's not even well formed. > > It should at least be telling them that any conformant XML tool will > refuse to even _read_ the document. As it is, it's giving them a W3C > stamp of approval -- wrong answer! That doesn't seem good, indeed. I thought SP's XML limitations sounded like obscure things that wouldn't come up much in practice, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I guess I'll have to have a look at expat or something else as a replacement. -- Gerald Oskoboiny <gerald@w3.org> +1 617 253 2920 System Administrator http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/ World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) http://www.w3.org/
Received on Thursday, 24 February 2000 17:30:43 UTC