Validators that don't validate (was RE: Cold Fusion)

At 03:52 PM 10/11/98 -0500, David Norris wrote:
>Home Site is totally customizable.  If something doesn't work the way you
>need, you likely can change it.  HTML Validator, Tag completion, Color
>syntax-highlighting, etc are all customizable.  Coding in Home Site is done
>by hand, and verified to be proper HTML using the built-in CSE 3310 HTML
>Validator, which you can easily modify.

The problem is that the built-in validator isn't a real validator.  In the
SGML world, a validator checks a document against a DTD, but CSE does not
do this, and the result is that some valid HTML 4.0 documents are
considered invalid by CSE and some invalid HTML 4.0 documents are
considered valid by CSE.

The result is that it's no longer possible to simply recommend that authors
validate their HTML.  One now has to qualify the statement by naming real
validators (such as the WDG [1] or W3C [2] validators).  I've run across
many authors looking for help who "validated" their documents only with CSE
when validating with a real validator would have solved their problem.

[1] http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/
[2] http://validator.w3.org/

-- 
Liam Quinn

Received on Tuesday, 10 November 1998 19:59:15 UTC