Re: Proposal: Don't to XML wf-ness checks on text/html pages [was: Validator timeout and XML-LibXML bug]

On Friday 18 June 2010, Michael(tm) Smith wrote:

> About the idea of disabling XML wellformedness checks, I want to
> raise something for discussion here that I've already also brought
> up off-list, which is: I don't think we should do XML
> wellformedness checking on pages that are served as text/html.

If we don't do that (for non-XML docs or at all) and leave it to 
SGML::Parser::OpenSP, validator will be bitten by OpenSP's XML limitations.  I 
gather this is pretty much the reason the "extra" XML wellformedness check 
exists in the first place; it was added in April 2007, in validator 0.8.0 beta 
1.  More info: http://openjade.sourceforge.net/doc/xml.htm

One example of this is that XHTML documents (no matter with what content type 
they are served with) containing something like:

    <p id="foo"class="bar">

(missing space between "foo" and class) will start to go unnoticed and 
declared valid by the validator, of course assuming there are no other errors 
the validator does catch.  I think this would be such a serious problem that 
it should be considered only as a last resort, and if done, the note about XML 
support limitations that was there in validator < 0.8.0 should be brought 
back.

Received on Friday, 18 June 2010 21:07:31 UTC