Re: Schemas and validation

On Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 3:10 PM, Joe D Williams <joedwil@earthlink.net> wrote:
> I believe that the browser could run something
> just fine that would not pass validation, but if valid, it should at least
> run.

Note that schemas, and indeed validation, is a poor way to test if
something runs "just fine" in a browser. Every document runs in a
browser, and there is defined behavior for essentially every document
(subject to hardware limitations, such as network speed and available
memory). I.e. once browsers correctly implement HTML5, they should in
general all behave the same way for a document, even if that document
is valid.

But on the flip side, just because something validates doesn't mean
that it'll do what you expect it to do. For example nothing about the
code in scripts gets any testing by a validator. But many other things
will validate fine, but not actually work the way you probably want
them to. Consider for example:

<a href="www.w3.org">W3C Home Page</a>

This will not link to "http://www.w3.org" as you likely intended, but
no HTML5 validator, or schema validator, is going to signal that as an
error.

Validation only checks for a certain, very limited, types of errors.

/ Jonas

Received on Tuesday, 2 March 2010 01:31:01 UTC