w3c and apache team

Hi all (sorry for a possible double post)
the default "404 Not Found" page generated by the latest version of Apache HTTP
Server (and the similar pages) doesn't pass the W3C Validator test
(
it's a HTML 2.0 code shipped without a meta tag with charset value: try this
foo page to see it:
http://www.apache.org/doesntexist.html
)

As I explain to the Apache developers
(
see
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=apache-httpd-dev&m=102918549709592&w=2
and
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=apache-httpd-dev&m=102925143132691&w=2
)
it's trivial to change the Apache C code to generate W3C pages but they have
technical reasons which don't permit to define a meta tag with charset
definition... so some minutes ago, on the Apache CVS tree it's appeared a fix
for a header problem, and as Greg Ames <gregames@apache.org> said
"I would hope that if (the Validator) saw a good http Content-Type header,
it wouldn't need the stuff in the html meta line."

Before trying the new Apache CVS code... I found a "problem": when your
Validator found a "404" on the response header of the server, it doesn't
parse the HTML provided anymore.

see this session and, trust me, the validator doesn't parse the code below:

#
# BEGIN
#

carlo@voyager:~$ telnet www.apache.org 80
Trying 63.251.56.142...
Connected to daedalus.apache.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET http://www.apache.org/doesntexist.html HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 15:41:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.40 (Unix)
Content-Length: 287
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<html><head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Not Found</h1>
<p>The requested URL /doesntexist.html was not found on this server.</p>
<hr />
<address>Apache/2.0.40 Server at www.apache.org Port 80</address>
</body></html>
Connection closed by foreign host.

#
# END
#

My question is: why don't you drive the Validator to parse the html code, even
when the return code is different from 200?
If you do like this, Apache team will be able to check if the fix on the code
which produces the header of the response is enough to pass the test.

Thank you.


-- 
Carlo Perassi - http://www.linux.it/~carlo/
Do only what only you can do (Edsger Wybe Dijkstra: 1930-2002)

Received on Tuesday, 13 August 2002 17:04:13 UTC