Re: XHTML Validation service - a comment

Nick:
Thanks for the response. Figured there had to some reason to inhibit or abort.

I would still suggest that on-balance (whatever that means) the good may
outweigh the dangers of incorrect formatting. I would make two further
comments here in terms of invalid chars affecting line numbering.
a. the validator has calculated some line number (which may be incorrect due
the invalid formatting) Best let the page author see what the validator
figured. Everyone is then on the same (maybe incorrect) hymn sheet.
b. I would certainly suppress the line number cross reference because it could
become very dangerous.
Regards

Nick Kew wrote:

> 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.

--
Ron Aitchison               http://www.zytrax.com
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Received on Monday, 15 July 2002 15:35:24 UTC