Re: validation in Opera

On Fri, 14 Mar 2003, David Bryant wrote:

> I understood you to be asking for a special access hook into the
> W3C validator that would _assume_ the presence of a <!DOCTYPE>
> statement even when no such statement was present.

Nope.  A default DTD does not imply a DOCTYPE.

> Since the use of <!DOCTYPE> is part of the enunciated standards,
> I couldn't see why such an assumption should ever be made.

DOCTYPE is mandated by W3C HTML standards, and its absence is an error.
I think the point was that the W3 validator treats that error as fatal,
and that that may be having a negative effect by turning novice users
away from validation altogether.

By contrast, Page Valet treats the error as non-fatal, and proceeds to
parse the page after reporting it.

Outside of HTML, there is no universal requirement for a DOCTYPE either
for SGML or XML.

-- 
Nick Kew