- From: Jukka Korpela <Jukka.Korpela@hut.fi>
- Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2001 11:12:26 +0200 (EET)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
On Mon, 8 Jan 2001, David M Abrahamson wrote:
> I have recently come across a commercial web site that uses HREFs of the
> form <A HREF="url:http://www.xyz.com">.
That's very strange usage, but it's not a validation issue.
> 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:".
You are quite correct. The use of url: there must be based on some
odd misunderstanding. But...
> Perhaps you might like to modify the validator to spot this form of error?
It is none of a validator's business to check what's inside an HREF
attribute, since such an attribute is declared as being CDATA, which
means roughly speaking "anything goes". So
HREF="foo:bar:zap hello world"
must pass validation, though it of course does not comply with the
specification. The HTML 4.01 specification tries to explain the meaning of
CDATA at http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#h-6.2 and although it is
neither very illustrative nor very exact in its content, it nevertheless
gives the message that in the formal syntax (which is all that a validator
deals with) a CDATA value is just a string of characters.
Well, literally it's
href %URI; #IMPLIED -- URI for linked resource --
but %URI; is just a synonym for CDATA:
<!ENTITY % URI "CDATA"
-- a Uniform Resource Identifier,
see [URI]
-->
(note that the text between --'s is a comment only and has no
significance in validation).
--
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/
Received on Monday, 8 January 2001 04:12:34 UTC