Re: Validator goofs on missing '

Ron Akkersdijk <akkersdi@hio.hen.nl> wrote:

> While checking various HMTL webpages made by
> our students I discovered what I think is a bug.
> The validator does not complain when a '>'
> is missing, see for instance the html code
> below, where the final ">" is missing from "</body"

This is not a bug.  The SGML declaration of HTML 4 [1] says
"SHORTTAG YES", which allows shorthand markup like </body</html>.
As noted in "Appendix B.3.7 Shorthand markup" of HTML 4 [2], such
construct is unlikely to work with many existing HTML tools, though.

XML doesn't allow this kind of shorthand markup, hence it's not
allowed in XHTML.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/sgmldecl.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.7

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 22:22:47 UTC