- From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <derhoermi@gmx.net>
- Date: Thu, 31 Oct 2002 14:22:22 +0100
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: W3C Validator <www-validator@w3.org>
* Ian Hickson wrote: >On Thu, 31 Oct 2002, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote: >> >> "Why do I need a document type declaration?" >> "The Validator won't validate without." > >No, it's: > > "Why do I need a document type declaration?" > "Your document is invalid without one." Indeed, but the validator says I could not parse this document, because it does not include a DOCTYPE Declaration. A DOCTYPE Declaration is mandatory for most current markup languages and without such a declaration it is impossible to validate this document. >> Let me repeat: >> >> if element html has attribute xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' >> default to XHTML 1.0 Transitional >> else >> default to HTML 4.01 Transitional > >No offense, but that is _hopelessly_ naiive. I don't think so... >You can't know whether the <html> element has a particular attribute until >after you've parsed the document, and you can't parse the document until >after you've decided whether it's HTML or XHTML. I won't disagree from a theoretical point of view, but the Validator already pre-parses the document entity using a tag-soup parser. Not without problems, as you state below. >[...] >Furthermore, the HTML working group has stated that user agents (and the >validator is a user agent) should not attempt to detect XHTML in text/html >documents. You don't suggest to adhere to this statement and thus treat XHTML documents as if they were HTML documents, do you?
Received on Thursday, 31 October 2002 08:22:09 UTC