Re: Validator fails to detect invalid document

Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

>Why would you say NO to OMITNAME and VALUE? Both are reasonably well
>supported by UAs, and used heavily by authors.

Ah, you seem to have cought me in the midst of some wishful thinking. :-)

You are right of course. OMITNAME and VALUE must needs remain "YES".


>Anyway, I still have issues with making the validator lie like this.
>This isn't what the spec says. The validator should be checking for
>compliance to the spec; it is not a lint.

Well, as mentioned, the previous message was "FYI" so no need to say
"still". I'm still undecided on this.

I do think the altered Decl gives us some desireable results, and makes the
Validator behave as users expect it to. These SHORTTAGS features fairly
obvious crud from a purely HTML POV (which is why they got tossed for XML
AFAICT).

OTOH, we have traditionally taken (strongly!) the position that fixing
these snafus is up to the HTML WG (or ISO, in the case of SGML) and that
our job is to enforce the rules no matter their apparent disingenuity.


I'm starting to lean towards making this, and other SHORTTAGS features, be
off by default in the current code. But this brings up a couple of issues.

1) Should we have a "pedantic" option to turn these on?
2) Should it default to on or off?

And -- as I'm taking this to the HTML Editor in the hopes that it will rate
an erratum -- would you agree that if my above suggestion were added to the
errata for HTML 4.01 that would justify enabling these checks by default
(well, more likely we would modify the SGML Decl used to match the errata)?

-- 
>For all I know they probably have a standard for
>which direction to put the thread on a bolt.

That would be ISO 261:1973.         -- John Cowan

Received on Monday, 11 November 2002 18:16:01 UTC