Re: XHTML Validation service - a comment

On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, Ron Aitchison wrote:

> This leads to my comment, I have just hit some pages in which the XHTML
> validator is complaining that certain line numbers do not contain valid
> UTF-8 codings. However in spite of checking the 'Show Source' option the
> validator aborts after this check and does not display the source.

Yes, that sounds about right.  If the validator shows source in the
presence of invalid characters, it risks being wildly wrong: what if
such a character affects line numbers?  OTOH, a simple listing might
indeed be helpful more often than not.

In terms of the validator innards, there is some complexity involved.
Validator shoves the input through iconv before applying OpenSP to
do the actual validation.  If there is a charset problem, there is
no satisfactory answer to the question of which input (before or
after iconv) to show.  The approach adopted by the WDG validator
might work better in this instance, though I can't say without
a URL to look at.  The XML Validation service at Site Valet won't
fix this particular problem, but might help you in any case.

-- 
Nick Kew

Available for contract work - Programming, Unix, Networking, Markup, etc.

Received on Sunday, 14 July 2002 19:08:43 UTC