- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Tue, 6 Apr 2004 08:55:45 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
On Tue, 6 Apr 2004, Jamie Norrish wrote: > The HTML validator considers a document valid which has a doctype > declaration where a public identifier is followed immediately by a > system identifier, contrary to ISO 8879 10.1.6, which specifies that > the two must be separated by a parameter separator. Is the validator > at fault here? Debatably not. The parameter separator is indeed part of the syntax, and the permission to omit it in some cases, as defined in 10.1.1, does not seem to apply. On the other hand, the error is in the document type declaration, not in the document proper, and according to definition 4.267, a reportable markup error is "a failure of a document to conform to this International Standard when it is parsed with respect to the active document and link types". So the document type definition seems to be implied, and errors in it, or in the way it is declared, might be interpreted as something that need not be reported. This is debatable especially since 4.267 lists errors that need not be reported, and they include "an error in the SGML declaration". If we think that (mentioning an) exception proves the (existence of a general) rule (to the contrary), then we might deduce that an error in a document type declaration must be reported, even when it causes no real ambiguity. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 6 April 2004 01:55:49 UTC