HTML 4 validation fails

Consider the following segment from a document:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">
<HTML>
<HEAD><TITLE>Fan Forum</TITLE>
<BASE HREF="http://www.fanforum.com/cgi-bin/forums/" />

Notice the " /" at the end of the BASE element.

As described in the XHTML 1 document, section C.2, the above
should be used to make the page XHTML compatible and still work
with HTML4 user agents.  While the above code segment does indeed
work with Netscape 4.7 for Linux, the validator complains that
there is a </HEAD> without an opening <HEAD>.  Remove the " /"
and the validator no longer complains.

Even though the case is wrong for an XHTML document (a whole different
can of worms for me), it isn't wrong for HTML.

To me, for an XHTML page to be XHTML compliant and be droppable into
HTML 4 user agents, the validator for HTML 4 shouldn't complain
about the above and shouldn't place the error on a whole different
element.

As a side comment, XHTML is starting to open up a bunch of cans of
worms.  I think there are going to be lots of open cans cluttering
up the place before all of this is over.

Oh, and don't suggest Tide to convert/fix current HTML code so that
it is HTML4 or XHTML1 compliant.  That program DESTROYS my hand
edited, vidiot readable, web documents.  I lay out my pages with
asWedit a way that makes them easy for me to read and edit.  Tide
does not keep that layout and even says that it won't.  I'm not
the only one, it seems, that wants to keep their layouts intact.

So, with the above validator error, it doesn't look as if I'll be
venturing into new territory any time soon, as I am not about to
hand edit 59000 web pages to make all of my uppercase elements
into lowercase, or ever write a Perl script to do it for me.  I
like uppercase elements (tags and attributes), as they are easier
to read/find in files.  Attributes are in uppercase and any
ascii text values are usually lower case (colors, keywords, etc).

I digress.

MB
-- 
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Received on Monday, 31 January 2000 11:24:45 UTC