Re: web site problem: 4.01 DTD not found at indicated URL...

Hi Philippe,

I'm not sure I agree with your assessment: we do serve
the URIs below. These URIs are for the "latest version of HTML 4",
which happens to be HTML 4.01. You can also use the following
URI (for example) to refer to this specific DTD.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/strict.dtd

What you find at a  "latest version" URI will change over time.
What you find at a specific version URI will not (to the
best of W3C's ability never to change data in a published
specification: we don't fix them, we replace them).

 - Ian

Philippe Verdy wrote:
> 
> The HTML 4.01 specification indicates specifies the following DTD to be used
> in the <!DOCTYPE> specifier:
> 
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
>    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
>    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
>    "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">
> 
> However your web site does not publish the DTD at the indicated addresses,
> because there is no "/TR/html4/" path, but instead the documents are in
> "/TR/html40/".
> 
> I think that there's no need to change the specification, however your web
> site should include a symbolic link in the "/TR/" folder from "html4/" to
> "html40/", so that the DTD can be successfully described.
> 
> I think this is an issue with external HTML validators, which try to check
> the reference to the DTD (to update its cached definition). But if the DTD
> does not exist, many validators ignore the <!DOCTYPE> element, and figure
> out its own "compatibility-mode" DTD, which does not enforce 4.01 rules.
> 
> You can see the problem when using the online HTML validator from
> http://www.netmechanic.com/ (click on the "HTML Check & Repair" tool).
> Most of time, NetMechanic does not validate attributes specified in HTML
> 4.01 like "id=", "hreflang=", ... and it signals an error in the DTD
> specified for the document: this is because the 4.01 specification can not
> be found, and then NetMechanic uses the previous 4.0 specification only !
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/strict.dtd
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd
> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/frameset.dtd

-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
Tel:                         +1 831 457-2842
Cell:                        +1 917 450-8783

Received on Saturday, 24 March 2001 22:32:55 UTC