Re: Beta: Fatal Error: No DOCTYPE specified!

* Terje Bless wrote:
>Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net> wrote:
>
>These issues as a whole have been assigned bug number #7.

Without the public beeing able to keep track of these bugs,
it's quite useless to inform it on bug numbers...

>><http://validator.w3.org:8001/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com>:
>>
>>Fatal Error: No DOCTYPE specified! [...]
>>
>>1) I don't see any good reason to refuse validation completly. It's very
>>   simple to choose document types to default to
>
>This is a conscious choice;

Conscious or not, it's a bad choice. The validator should especially
help those people, who are not standard-experts; those will get very
frustrated using the validator if it always refuses to check their
documents for no good reasons. Even if they take the advise, download
the document from their server, modify the document type declaration,
upload it again, and then validate it again, they will be confronted
with the validator to refuse validation because of a missing encoding
declaration. They may then again try to fix this problem. If they'll
then be able to validate, they probably get dozens of error messages
they don't understand. That's far away from what I would call usable.

>>2) the page should display the revalidate form
>
>Agreed, but it may be tricky to implement.

Not my fault :-)

>>3) It's "document type declaration", not "DOCTYPE declaration", please
>>keep the terminology straight
>
>Actually, AFAICT, it's "Document Type Definition" and "DOCTYPE
>Declaration".

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#dt-doctype

You won't find the term "DOCTYPE declaration" in that document.

>>4) The phrase talks about a "first line", while the document type
>>declaration in the example takes two lines
>
>Pedant! :-)
>
>Yeah, thanks, good catch! I'll fix it ASAP. How does "At the very beginning
>of your document" sound to you?

Wrong. Depending on the point of view you may have a BOM, an XML
declaration, processing instructions, comments, etc. prior to the
document type declaration. "Prior to the root element".

>>5) The example should (as per XHTML 1.0) include a XML declaration
>
>The XML Declaration is problematic in that current browsers (FSVO
>"current") tend to do undesireable things when faced with one; and XHTML
>1.0 also reccomends against including one in "Appendix C" documents.

No, see Bertilo's mail. The only noteworthy undesireable thing connected
to the XML declaration is that Microsoft Internet Explorer for Windows
6.0 switches back to bugwards-compatible processing of XHTML documents
if they contain a XML declaration. Please try counting the number of W3C
documents that already use an XML declaration.

>>6) The example should (as per XHTML 1.0) use both, the lang and the
>>xml:lang attribute
>
>Hmm. Isn't the "lang" attribute a compatibility crutch?

Yes, but I don't see a good reason to ignore XHTML 1.0's "Use both the
lang and xml:lang attributes when specifying the language of an element"
and thereby advertising "incompatible" markup.

Received on Friday, 25 October 2002 06:23:31 UTC