- From: Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be>
- Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:04:28 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
At 02:04 8/11/2005, Bruce Bailey, wrote (in a reply to Becky Gibson): <blockquote> (...) Okay, I will succinctly summarize: "Thus, I can live with a requirement at level 1 that my code is well-formed - that is good coding practice and can help accessibility. I can not live with a requirement for completely VALID code at level 1." Your clarification regarding xml (including xhtml) is all well and good. What is your proposal for evaluating the "well-formedness" of HTML 3.2 and 4.01 content? I am not aware of a widely accepted freely available automated measure for this. </blockquote> The only technique I can think of is using a validating SGML parser and discarding the validation errors. Even though wellformedness is not defined in SGML, SGML parsers can catch errors that have nothing to do with incorrect attributes and content models. NSGMLS is part of the open-source SGML parser SP [1] (by James Clark) and now also available as OpenSP [2] (part of OpenJade). SP is also the core of the W3C HTML validator. Going to an online validator is not always practical, but there are a few alternatives. Igor Podlubny has provided an off-line validator as a clipbook for NoteTab [3]. Matti Tukiainen has described how you can create an off-line validator with SP on Windows [4]. I think that people who are proficient in shellscript could easily create a Linux equivalent. There used to be a VB wrapper around SGMLS (SP Wizard, by Larry Robertson), but it has not been updated for ages [5]. I am aware of the limitations of this "technique": - you need to weed out the validation errors to find another type of errors; - it may not work with all SGML parsers because - to my knowledge - the SGML specification does not define the output of an SGML parser or even that an SGML parser should validate; - SP seems very hard to localise, so users need to know English. [1] http://www.jclark.com/sp/index.htm [2] http://openjade.sourceforge.net/doc/index.htm [3] http://www.tuke.sk/podlubny/ov.html [4] http://ktmatu.com/info/do-it-yourself-offline-html-validator/ [5] http://www.eccnet.com/sgmlug/spwizard/ Regards, Christophe Strobbe -- Christophe Strobbe K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on Document Architectures Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM tel: +32 16 32 85 51 http://www.docarch.be/ Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm
Received on Wednesday, 9 November 2005 10:06:03 UTC