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

On 18 Jun 2010, at 4:06 PM, Ville Skyttä wrote:

> 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.

Out of curiosity, is there a more abstract UI that would be useful to  
people (hiding at first glance the well-formedness test, for example):

  * I am interested in maximum browser compatibility
  * I am interested in XML-compatibility, and am ok with extra  
processing

I made up those two, but perhaps there is a simpler interface for  
newbies.


  _ Ian


--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Friday, 18 June 2010 21:16:45 UTC