Re: Should Relative URL in format 'http:g/' validate

* "Terje Bless" <link@tss.no> wrote:
| On 25.10.00 at 20:47, Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
|
| >URI syntax checking and link checking is far beyhond the scope of what a
| >Validator should do.
|
| Not really. The attributes in question have a specific data type which is
| defined to be a valid URI according RFC"whatever". Checking that does
| conform to those rules is not out of scope for the validator. More to the
| point though, it's not out of scope as an extra feature that can be enabled
| with a switch on the invoking form.
|
| The same goes for checking links.

Validation is nothing more or less than checking some document against its
associated DTD. A Validator should only do this validation. Everything that
goes beyhond Validation is not a task that the validator should perform. The
value of any href attribute in HTML 4.01 is defined as CDATA, the validator
should look whether the value conforms to the given SGML/XML rules or not. If
a href attribute value is valid CDATA the validator must not complain about
that. If we extend the functionality of the W3C validator it is no longer a
Validator.

I suggest reading Alan Flavell's
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/validate.html

A checker that performs further checking of (X)HTML is very useful, but a
checker is no validator.

If you like to have a checker, call it a checker. To implement these features
into the W3C Validator is not that easy. Currently it wraps the output of
nsgmls into a HTML document. A checker needs another parser than nsgmls.

I don't really believe that it is that worthly to create such a service. XHTML
in combination with XML Schema could do a better job.

regards,
--
Björn Höhrmann ^ mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de ^ http://www.bjoernsworld.de
am Badedeich 7 ° Telefon: +49(0)4667/981ASK ° http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
25899 Dagebüll # PGP Pub. KeyID: 0xA4357E78 # http://learn.to/quote +{i}
..weaving a secure, well-formed, standard compliant WWW for =everyone=..

Received on Wednesday, 25 October 2000 17:10:58 UTC