- From: Dr. Olaf Hoffmann <Dr.O.Hoffmann@gmx.de>
- Date: Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:35:07 +0100
- To: public-html@w3.org
Leif Halvard Silli: >What most people will be interested in is what the W3 Validator >considers valid. Unfornately what the current experimental validator has to say about documents using some W3C recommended formats without a doctype in it, is often wrong or completely useless. These were at least my test results using several valid documents of the recommended formats SVG tiny 1.2 and XHTML+RDFa. Because the information or the hints of the validator are wrong or useless, it does indeed not matter at all, which extensions you put into those documents or what other formats from well known or unknown namespaces are inside such docments. Best what author can currently do for such documents is, to ignore the current experimental variant completely - and that should be obvious to any author looking on the ridiculous hints of this tool for samples of the mentioned formats ;o) Since this happened, I think, the validator lost already some authority about what can be considered a valid document - and in earlier times this was already problematic due to the limitations of DTDs, but still pretty helpful for a rough test. And because newer formats tend to have no doctype anymore or are far too complex for a proper scheme, such validators will loose authority in the future much more, if they do not manage to validate at least a mixture of known formats and versions of formats without DTD, what is obviously not a trivial task. Hopefully the current validator experiments lead to something more usable in the future. If not, we have to teach authors not to use such validators anymore. But this current validation crises has an advantage too - authors learn not to rely on this validation and they can start simply to do what already works - mixing formats from different namespaces in one XML-document, even if there is no DTD available for this mix. Olaf
Received on Wednesday, 20 January 2010 13:38:30 UTC