DTD for HTML 4.01 on official W3C homepage damaged?

Dear Sir or Madam

I'm a German research assistant teaching a HTML/CSS-course for
beginners this semester at university in Wuerzburg. I wanted to show
my students how they can validate their HTML/CSS-Code. But the
validator http://validator.w3.org didn't recognize any errors (omitted
html-tag, omitted start- and end-tags...). So I tried it with oxygen
from SyncroSoft. The program told me, that there are errors within the
DTD. It really tried to validate the document using the DTDs that are
available online at the W3C homepage. I tried each of the following
HTML-Declarations and oxygen always detected errors in the DTDs:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<!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 Frameset//EN"
 "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/frameset.dtd">

The DTDs you find opening the URLs seem to be damaged. For me it looks
 like some Entities have a missing closing bracket ">" and some
comments don't start with "<!--" but only with "--". You can find the
same problems at chapter 21 of the HTML 4.01 Specification:
http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/sgml/dtd.html.
Perhaps I used the wrong URLs in the DTDs or something went wrong with
a transformation on the website?
I only want to inform you about this and would ask you to take a look
at the DTDs yourself to check them.

I know that HTML-code is handled very leniently by all browsers and
that it doesn't really matter, that the code is absolutely valid. So
there is actually no need to validate HTML-code. But I think it's a
matter of good style to keep to a given standard.
I'm using now XHTML-transitional for my course, this works very well.


Sincerely yours
Daniel Hoffmann

Received on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 21:16:32 UTC