Suggestion for Change in HTML Validatior

Hello there,

I have recently come across a commercial web site that uses HREFs of the
form <A HREF="url:http://www.xyz.com">.  While Internet Explorer is capable
of following such links, Netscape is not, but when I suggested to the web
owner that his page was broken, he informed me that it validates okay.

Quoting from RFC 2396 "Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax"
- Berners-Lee, et al, August 1998:

 3. URI Syntactic Components

    The URI syntax is dependent upon the scheme.  In general, absolute
    URI are written as follows:

       <scheme>:<scheme-specific-part>

    An absolute URI contains the name of the scheme being used (<scheme>)
    followed by a colon (":") and then a string (the <scheme-specific-
    part>) whose interpretation depends on the scheme.

This requires that "url:http" be a valid scheme, which it is not.

Once again, quoting from RFC 2396:

 E. Recommendations for Delimiting URI in Context

    ...

    In practice, URI are delimited in a variety of ways, but usually
    within double-quotes "http://test.com/", angle brackets
    <http://test.com/>, or just using whitespace ...

    These wrappers do not form part of the URI.

    ...

    For robustness, software that accepts user-typed URI should attempt
    to recognize and strip both delimiters and embedded whitespace.

Since the URI bracketing in an HREF attribute value is done using "..." or
'...', not "URL:..." or 'url:...', I cannot see any requirement on an HTML
browser to find and strip out the "url:".

Perhaps you might like to modify the validator to spot this form of error?

DMA.

Received on Monday, 8 January 2001 03:23:43 UTC