Misleading (or wrong) messages

If I validate a document against HTML 4.01 doctype and the
document contains a form where input elements are not wrapped
into block-level containers (try just <form action=""><input></form>),
I get the message

document type does not allow element "INPUT" here; missing one of "P",
"H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "PRE", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag

This is at least seriously misleading, if not simply wrong.

There are many other elements that could be used here, such as
FIELDSET or TABLE. The list cannot even be taken as a practical suggestion
on the typical elements to use (and if it were, it should be worded
differently), since surely most of the elements listed are _uncommon_ in
forms - and it would be rather odd to wrap an INPUT element inside a
heading element, as the message seems to be suggesting as one feasible
option! :-)

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2003 02:27:12 UTC