Re: Suggestion: Check elment first, attribute second

On Fri, 3 Aug 2001, Martin Duerst wrote:

> I guess one thing that might be worth a try is to add an option
> that lists the errors by 'seriousness', unknown elements being
> more serious than unknown attributes. But I have no idea whether
> it would be easy or difficult to order the error messages.

SP generates messages at five "severity" levels.  Code Valet uses
CSS colour codes with <??? class="error|warning|..."> to help
improve presentation to users.  Unfortunately this is of limited
use, because all validation messages have the same severity!


> For XML, another approach would be to do two checks, one for
> well-formedness and another for validation. Well-formedness
> errors are usually much more fundamental.

It can't hurt to offer that (though I'd make it a separate Form:
adding it as an option in a single form would only confuse).

> Nick, Terje, Bjoern,... what do you think?

Apart from this, we could offer to turn certain classes of warning
on or off.  Liam recently updated the WDG validator to generate a
more useful level of warnings, but didn't make it a user option
(possibly he thought it would confuse users: Liam, are you listening?)

But none of the above really gets us there.  A more thorough review
of parser messages could be on my own medium-term agenda, but I
make no promises.

-- 
Nick Kew

Site Valet - the essential service for anyone with a website.
<URL:http://valet.webthing.com/>

Received on Saturday, 4 August 2001 11:59:05 UTC