- From: Timothy A. McDaniel <tmcd@jump.net>
- Date: Thu, 2 Mar 2000 18:41:33 -0500 (EST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
(I'm not a list member; sorry about the parachuting in via _Feedback_.) Someone was just complaining on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html about the output for his page. He had an invalid DOCTYPE, where it was all in uppercase rather than mixed-case ("3.2 FINAL" instead of "3.2 Final"). (Hey, *I* thought HTML control elements were entirely case-insensitive too.) It generated four error messages which both of us found to be incomprehensible (as I don't know the components of a DOCTYPE directive). Then it gave an error for almost every line of his file. I know that when I left off the DOCTYPE entirely, it had a good message of the form Error: Missing DOCTYPE declaration at start of document (explanation...) where "(explanation...)" was a link to http://www.htmlhelp.org/tools/validator/doctype.html I think that if the DOCTYPE is present but invalid, the same link ought to be provided. That alone would help greatly, even if my other suggestions are infeasible. I also wonder whether it would be better for most users' purposes just to say something like Error: DOCTYPE is not one of the valid values for an HTML file (explanation...) rather than, I gather, try to mention the problem for each part of the DOCTYPE. (My uneduated guess is that each part is separate and significant for a general SGML document, so this is not possible with just the SGML parser as is. If so, perhaps a validator wrapper could check the DOCTYPE for HTML specifically, and only if it's valid pass the document to the full SGML parser?) If an invalid DOCTYPE produces errors for most or all the following lines, even simple things like "<html>", I see no reason to report them: it wastes server time and can further confuse the user. If the DOCTYPE is present but invalid, is it possible to just abort further checking, or perhaps just flush all the further error messages? The person complaining thought that, if the DOCTYPE be invalid, the validator could lowercase it and compare it with the lowercased valid versions, and give a more specific message in that case. This seems more work for less gain; if the list of valid DOCTYPEs is always given, or a pointer to them, that should suffice. -- Tim McDaniel is tmcd@jump.net; if that fail, tmcd@us.ibm.com is my work account.
Received on Thursday, 2 March 2000 18:51:15 UTC