[Bug 1500] XHTML-sent-as-text/html is parsed as XML

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=1500





------- Comment #16 from w3-2006@ryandesign.com  2007-05-02 10:36 -------
Oliver, I don't see why you've now changed your mind on this. My comment #8
from last year still applies, and all I can do is paraphrase it again. Heck,
the original problem description from almost 2 years ago seems to still
describe it pretty well too: The validator declares documents as valid though
they violate the XHTML 1.0 spec, appendix C, section 3.

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#guidelines

I'm not implying any strength of the prose of the spec, and I don't care
whether that section is "normative" or "informative" or any other big word; it
describes a behavior that web site authors and therefore browsers should
follow, and popular browsers (Safari, Firefox) do in fact implement the
described behavior. When web site authors do not follow the guidelines of that
section of the spec, their web sites break under those browsers. When bug
reports are filed on this with the web site authors, and the particular browser
they're using (Internet Explorer, I think) does not exhibit this problem, and
the web site author does one last check and validates the document using the w3
validator, they find it to be valid and in turn reject the bug report, saying
the browser must be at fault. But it is not. It is behaving in accordance with
the aforementioned spec.

I did not spend hours researching this problem just so you could decide 9
months later that it's not a problem after all. It is. It really is. Please
reopen the bug and amend the validator.

It takes an effort to report bugs to web site authors (or anyone else). When
those bug reports are rejected, some reporters may give up rather than fight
them on it. The end result is that fewer bugs in web sites are fixed, and users
of standards-compliant browsers are disadvantaged. That is surely not the end
result we're all looking for.

Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2007 10:36:44 UTC