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

On Wed, Oct 25, 2000 at 11:07:33PM +0200, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> * "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.

I think it's fine to add extra features like this to the validator,
as long as it is always very clear what it is actually doing.

Aside from that, I'm generally in favor of any features that help
contribute to the interoperability and reliability of the Web.

> regards,
> --

That should be dash-dash-space to be a valid sig delimiter ;)

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny       <gerald@w3.org>  +1 613 261 6630
System Administrator   http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)      http://www.w3.org/

Received on Saturday, 28 October 2000 00:26:33 UTC