RE: Problems with validating <table> elements

On 10/8/01 at 12:29 PM, leahy@lycos-inc.com (Frank Leahy) wrote:

> Right.  The purpose of running the validator is to find problems
> during development,

That is arguable. The purpose of the validator is to determine whether
or not a page conforms to the specified standard. Validity (or lack
there of) is not an assuarance there there are or are not "problems".

> and dropped </td> and </tr> tags are the kinds of things that need to
> be caught because they could be indicators of bigger problems with the
> site.  And running Tidy, as Masayasu has suggested, doesn't help at
> all.
> 
> Bottomline, it would be great if there were a flag on the validator
> that would allow for "strict table elements checking".

While it is useful to have a tool that can do this, the validator is not
the appropriate tool for this. The validator is a DTD driven tool and
can not be made to issue warnings or errors outside the scope of the DTD
without marginalizing this very specific design.

There are tools out there which can provide this sort of feedback. These
are generally called "linters" or "syntax checkers" and can be used as
good tools in conjunction with a validator.

> And while someone's at it it would be great if it were possible to
> turn off the &entity; checking in urls -- no one needs to be told that
> "/foo.asp?a=b&c=d" has an uknown entity &c

Why does no one need to be told this? The above is in fact wrong and
this needs to be conveyed to the author.

> (and the suggestion to replace all & with &amp; in urls not the
> correct response :-)

While it is possible to have an unencoded & in the content of an HREF
attribute without the content being invalid, the above case is not one
of them. And in no case does encoding the & make the content invalid or
hamper the proper parsing of the HREF attribute by a conforming user
agent.


-- 
Christian Smith  |  csmith@barebones.com  |  http://web.barebones.com

He who dies with the most friends... Is still dead!

Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 14:33:06 UTC