feature suggestion: fragment context selection

Individual authors often write complete HTML documents, but 
organizations tend to write fragments of HTML documents, which 
eventually get concatenated into complete documents. It is currently 
cumbersome to validate document fragments; it involves making up a 
minimal template representing the ancestry of the fragment.

I suggest adding a "parent element" selector for fragments, or 
perhaps logic that would contextualize the root node of the fragment 
submitted for validation. I think this would work as long as the 
fragments were at least reasonably  well-formed. For instance, if you 
wanted to validate, say, just a table that would ultimately be nested 
within another, you might select TD/TH from a select/option element, 
submit your fragment, and the validator would synthesize a complete 
document for validation, with your fragment as the child of a TD/TH 
element in an otherwise valid document. Alternatively, the validator 
might guess that because the root of your fragment is LI, its parent 
must be OL/UL, and synthesize an appropriate template.
--
Todd Fahrner

Received on Friday, 27 October 2000 17:25:25 UTC