Re: Validator errors

At 05:37 PM 1/29/2000 , Vidiot wrote:
>URL: www.vidiot.com/forumdispay.html
>1) Validator does not like mixed-case tags, i.e., <HEAD> </head>
>    It errors and says that there is an ending </head> without a start.
>    That is obviously false.  Tags are not case sensitive and neither
>    should the validator be case sensitive.

Hi, this isn't strictly speaking true for all versions of HTML.
XHTML requires tags to not be mixed case.

>2) Error: end tag for "BASE" omitted, but OMITTAG NO was specified.
>    Excuse me, but </BASE> is FORBIDDEN.  And where did I end up
>    specifying "OMITTAG NO"?  I certainly didn't select any options
>    to do that.

This is also something that's in XHTML -- all tags in XHTML need to
be closed, i.e. either <BASE HREF="whatever" /> or <BASE></BASE>.

>There are tons of errors listed for the page, many of them valid.
>Many of them not.  I have no trust in the validator at all.

There are two factors at work:

1.  Your page does not specify a DTD with a doctype statement.
     This means that your level/flavor of HTML is undefined.  It's
     clear from your comments that you want HTML 4.01, but you don't
     say that, so the Validator (and any other user agent) is free
     to simply "guess."

2.  In this case, it's clear that the Validator has guessed that
     you are using XHTML 1.0.  I assume that this is relatively
     new default behavior for the Validator; as before it would
     assume HTML 4.0 when there was no specified doctype.

There are two things that need to be done:

1.  You (Vidiot) need to start using valid doctypes on your pages
     if you want to use a specific HTML flavor such as HTML 4.01.

2.  Gerald needs to rethink the utility of having the default be
     XHTML 1.0.  While I can see -why- he'd choose this -- the W3C
     has an interest in promoting the use of XHTML instead of HTML,
     and this is one way of raising awareness -- I feel that it's
     just going to result in confusing and frustration for the
     default DTD to be anything other than HTML 4.01.

--Kynn


-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                   http://www.kynn.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet      http://www.idyllmtn.com/
Become AWARE of Web Accessibility!                  http://aware.hwg.org/
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Received on Sunday, 30 January 2000 16:38:26 UTC