Perversity/erroneous reporting by the www validator

I have recently been undertaking a programme of fixing my old Netscape 
4.x-produced pages into a valid state, and, in the process of which, I 
have discovered a rather disconcerting effect of the bad doctype 
specified by Netscape's composer on the part of the validator. 
Basically, it flags otherwise perfect html in the rest of the document 
as being invalid, giving quite the wrong impression as to the state of 
one's work. The validator should flag the incorrect doctype and stop and 
complain about it or it should flag the incorrect doctype and carry on 
and not flag as incorrect perfectly valid html in the rest of the document.

For a concrete example, load both of these pages in a browser, scroll to 
the bottom and click on the Validator Check link. The valid page turns 
up valid (no surprise) and the invalid one comes up with 80 errors. This 
is not acceptable behaviour. There is one error in that page and a 
pretty minor one at that; the doctype is incorrect -- 20-odd letters in 
6 words have the wrong case. The two pages are otherwise identical.

http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/valid.html
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/invalid.html

I can't say that I understand why case is an issue in the doctype but 
not in the rest of the document. At any rate, the validator should 
probably accept it as is and report back that it is tentatively valid 
and that correcting the doctype would completely validate the page.
-- 
David P. James
4th Year Economics Student
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario
http://members.rogers.com/dpjames/

The bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe.
-Dr. Leonard McCoy, Star Trek IV

Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2003 16:21:43 UTC