Re: Bug in Validator

On Thu, 11 May 2000, Otto Stolz wrote:

> an obvious syntax error is not diagnosed by the validator:
>   </OL
> 
>   <P>
> i. e., the closing ">" is missing from the end-of-OL tag.

It is a typo in practical terms and should be fixed, but it is
not a syntax error with respect to the formal rules, and a
validator's job is to check conformance to those rules, and only that.

The construct </OL<P> is formally valid (and equivalent to </OL><P>) due
to so-called short-hand
markup rules, see
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.7
for an informal explanation, and SGML documentation for rigorous rules.

Browsers generally do not support short-hand markup, which on the other
hand is what HTML specifications officially allow. This is unfortunate,
but a validator has to do what a validator has to do.

> I am not regularly reading this list; so please adress (cc:) any
> check-backs to me, privately.

I do this time, but please note in future that this is not normal
practice in public mailing lists. Discussions on this list are
available at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/

-- 
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html

Received on Monday, 15 May 2000 01:56:17 UTC