Re: validator bug: id values compared case-insensitively

Hi Mike,

Le 23 avr. 2011 à 05:38, Michael[tm] Smith a écrit :
> In normal HTML mode (non-XML, non-HTML5), the markup validator is checking
> HTML id values case-insensitively. As far as I can see according to the HTML4
> spec, it shouldn't be -- it should instead check them case-sensitively.
> 
> But before raising a validator bug for it, I wanted to double-check here to
> make sure I'm not misunderstanding something about HTML4, and also to find
> out whether this is a known issue that's already been reported (if so, I
> couldn't find anything for it in W3C bugzilla).

There is a thread [1] in July 2001 about it.
Eric Meyer had reported the error [2]

    Anyway, a teammate has uncovered what we're pretty sure
    is a bug in validator centered on the case of ID names.
    I've created a simple test page:
    
     <URL:http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/tests/val-casetest.html>

Masayasu Ishikawa had answered that it was "a known contradiction in the specification itself due to historical reason." but maintained that it was not a bug in the validator but a weirdness in the specification. Eric Meyer was not happy about it and Björn Höhrmann confirmed [4] what Masayasu was saying. More discussions, more disagreements. Terje Bless further said [5]

    the W3C HTML Validator can't actually check conformance
    to the HTML Reccommendation _because_ it's an SGML
    validator and not an HTML Validator. The HTML Rec.
    contains many constraints that are not possible to
    express in SGML, this beeing one of them.

Indeed I didn't find a bug about it in the bugzilla. Strange.

[1]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2001JulSep/thread#16
[2]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2001JulSep/0016
[3]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2001JulSep/0019
[4]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2001JulSep/0021


-- 
Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
Developer Relations & Tools, Opera Software

Received on Saturday, 23 April 2011 11:31:21 UTC