Markup Validator validates sites on IP addresses which are not globally valid

I tried to validate a page on my development host and I accidentally
entered its internal LAN IP address. The validator returned the error:

 I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve
<http://172.16.18.167/tabledemo.html>:

500 Can't connect to 172.16.18.167:80 (Timeout)

Please make sure you have entered the URI correctly.

I got confused at first by the timeout message, as my connection is
fast
enough and the web server is up and running and the validator should
not have timeout problems, but when I realized what
has happened, I tried to validate http://127.0.0.1 and the Validator
happily validated it as Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, probably validatating
the page at http://www.w3.org/.

I think that validating sites on IP addresses, which are not globally
valid(IPs used only on
LANs or as loopback addresses), should be
forbidden as this might cause confusion to users of the validator that
accidentally enter invalid IP addresses and might
lead to security isues with people trying to steal information from the
W3C network.

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2003 05:01:12 UTC