Re: Validating the validator ?

Philip TAYLOR wrote:

> 
> When presented with a broken URL, the Jigsaw
> validator quite reasonably reports an error :
> 
>>  w3c
>> CSS
>> Validator
>> Error
>> Target: http://www.freewe
>> 
>> I/O Error: The host name [www.freewe] couldn't be resolved. Details:
>> "www.freewe: www.freewe"
> 
> However, if one attempts to validate the HTML used to generate
> this error message, one is told  that an Internal Server
> Error has occurred :
> 
>> W3C QA Markup Validation Service
>> v0.7.3
>> 
>>     * Skip Navigation | Home
>>     * About...
>>     * News
>>     * Docs
>>     * Help & FAQ
>>     * Feedback
>> 
>> Sorry! This document can not be checked.
>> 
>> I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve
>> <http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://www.freewe>:
>> 
>>     500 Internal Server Error
>> 
>> If you made recent changes to your domain name (DNS) configuration, you
>> may also want to check that your domain records are correct, or ask your
>> hosting company to do so. Valid XHTML 1.0! The W3C Validator Team
> 
> Is this the expected behaviour ?

Yes, though there is room for improvements.

1) The CSS Validator seems to crash hard, when it cannot resolve the
hostname, instead of properly handling the error. The result of the crash
is the error document which you saw, with the correct status code 500.

2) The HTML Validator sees this error and refuses to validate it. Although
it could, even if it says it cannot. If you go to the Extended Interface
and check "Validate error pages", it will also validate documents with
status codes != 200:
<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fjigsaw.w3.org%2Fcss-validator
%2Fvalidator%3Furi%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.freewe&charset=%28detect+automatically
%29&doctype=Inline&verbose=1&No200=1> (long URL broken)

The validator should say on its error document that there is such an option,
perhaps providing a direct link with this option set.


-- 
Benjamin Niemann
Email: pink at odahoda dot de
WWW: http://pink.odahoda.de/

Received on Wednesday, 8 November 2006 19:46:31 UTC