Re: 2 bugs in the W3 html validator service

On Fri, 2001-09-28 at 05:58, Brent Boyer wrote:
> The first bug is that the new version of the validator
>     http://validator.w3.org/file-upload.html
> 
> gives a fatal error if it encounters a page with the following set of meta 
> tags:
>     <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html">
>     <meta http-equiv="charset" content="iso-8859-1">
> 
> To get it to work, it demands that you either (a) eliminate the 2 meta tags 
> and thus foce it to guess the encoding or (b) combine both meta tags into 1, 
> like
>     <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
> 
> This is annoying, as I have a ton of pages that validated with your old 
> validator, and which use the 2 meta tag form (which I think is clearer 
> anyway).

This may be considered a bug in the old version that has been fixed in
the new version. The two meta tags form is not a valid way to express
the character encoding. If you have any reference for this usage I would
be *most* interested to see it!

While I can't help with the clarity issue, you should be able to fix it
with a simple search and replace operation in any decent text editor or
a tool specifically for the purpose (I can whip up some Perl for it in a
couple of minutes if that'd help you any).


> The second bug is that after you have gotten your validation results on the 
> page
>     http://validator.w3.org/check
> 
> if you then click on the Revalidate button, it does NOT revalidate -- 
> instead, it takes me back to the home page
>     http://validator.w3.org/

It definitely shouldn't do that. Could you describe in more detail how
you triggered this bug? For instance, the bug does not manifest when I:

1. Go to <URL:http://validator.w3.org/>.
2. Enter "http://www.yahoo.com/" into the "Address" Form field.
3. Press the "Validate this page" submit button.
4. Press the "Revalidate" submit button on the results page.

There must be something unique about the URI you are trying to Validate
or the staps you take while validating it, that trigger the bug.



> A third item of feedback, which altho technically not a bug but is a very 
> bad feature, is that the textfield for doing CSS validation by file upload, 
> i.e.
>     http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator-upload.html
> 
> is SOOO long that you can only see the Browse button to the right of it if 
> you have a very big window.  It is trivial to fix this.  (I believe that all 
> you need to do is change the attribute
>      size="60"
> in the first input tag to something like
>      size="30"
> )

This is an issue for the www-validator-css@w3.org mailinglist. The two
Validators are not directly related (maintained by different people). I
would of course be happy to forward the matter for you if you would
prefer.

Received on Friday, 28 September 2001 05:35:55 UTC