Re: feature suggestion: fragment context selection

On Fri, Oct 27, 2000 at 02:25:14PM -0700, Todd Fahrner wrote:
> 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.

One hack you might be able to use to get around this is:

    <!DOCTYPE table PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
    <table><tr><td></td></tr></table>

> 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.

I don't think this kind of publishing model is widespread enough
to justify adding a feature like this to the validator.

I would think that any publisher with this kind of system in
place would have the resources available to add validation at
the appropriate step(s) of the publishing process.

-- 
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 02:16:22 UTC