[Bug 13821] href attributes not being restricted to valid URIs

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13821

--- Comment #5 from Ben <sepster@internode.on.net> 2011-08-19 10:22:45 UTC ---
The help page says this, re the gap b/w conformance and validity:

"A document is valid when it is correctly written in
accordance to the formal grammar, whereas conformance relates to the
specification itself. The two might be equivalent, but in most cases, some
conformance requirements can not be expressed in the grammar, making validity
only a part of the conformance."  

That last sentence implies that any gap between validity and conformance is as
a result of being unable to express certain usage requirements in the language
of a validity grammar.  It does not suggest, as you have, that any gap could be
as a result of incomplete/insufficient specification within the DTD.

But I appreciate that the validator is working against the DTD.  Perhaps I
should be logging a bug with the DTD itself?  Or perhaps with the help
documentation itself which is apparently misleading?  Is this possible?

Because one way or the other and regardless of where the fault lies, the
validator is NOT producing correct results wrt validity against the
authoritative technical specification, and the formal grammar contained
therein, for a URI as defined by the IETF RFC, as the help documentation
implies it should.

This is not minutia.  The URI is a concept that exists beyond an XHTML
definition, so it seems reasonable that the XHTML definition should use a
definition of a URI that is in line with the broader understanding (and more
importantly, specification) of what a URI actually is.  It's NOT a general
string, by (strict) definition! 

Perhaps the help documentation could be re-written to qualify that the formal
grammar that is referred to, is the W3C one, and that this may or may not
accurately reflect the restrictions imposed by the authoritative technical
specification and/or formal grammar of the individual sub-units that form part
of an XHTML document?

And I have to ask (as I'm seriously struggling to understand it!) why isn't a
URI, of all things, sufficiently specified in the DTD?  Am I missing something?
 Surely well-formed URIs within a document instance are of much more
(practical) importance than a misplaced or missing closing P tag, for example?

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Received on Friday, 19 August 2011 10:22:52 UTC