Re: suggest validator prefer URI to FPI

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Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org> wrote:

[ Leaving slightly excessive quoted material to keep context ]
>>But this is _not_ what I read Dan's suggestion to be. Even after
>>several readings of what he wrote, my understanding of it is that he
>>wants the SysID to be preferred over a PubID; regardless that both are
>>present and whether they differ, and with no particular note of a
>>desire for a user warning when they differ.
>
>No, that's not what I want. I was perhaps too brief when I wrote
>
>"I'd like the markup validation service to provide clear feedback about
>that problem."
>
>but all of the stuff Dom suggests sounds good to me.

Then I apologize for going off on an, apparently, unrelated tangent! I didn't
see that one at all.


Yes, catching this problem would be a very good thing to do, I agree.

Karl's original suggestion also mapped out ways we could make note of it when
the URL used to reference one of the «Well Known» DTDs — i.e. HTML, XHTML,
MathML, etc. — differs from the canonical location at w3.org, and I think he'd
even figured out how to maintain the list of «canonical» URLs without spending
excessive amounts of time on tracking down the latest changes in TR space.

There are also several other known issues with the Markup Validator's
treatment of DTDs that need fixing; not least among them that it's
(deliberately) supressing errors detected in the DTD — well, in a location
other than the original document, but… — and so at best giving confusing
results and at worst misrepresents the status of a document instance.

Come to think about it, these «issues» that have existed for a while and have
proved tricky to fix should probably be documented rather prominently on
v.w3.org. ( Olivier: Do you have time make a first pass at this one? )


>>As best I can tell this is just another effort to impose arbitrary
>>preferences expressed in WebArch on the Markup Validator; since, at
>>least as far as I was able to interpret Dan's message, his suggestion
>>was not attempting to solve any actual technical problem.
>
>Oh please! I made it pretty clear that I am an actual user of the
>validation service, and I was using it in my real-world, day-to-day
>life, maintaing pages for groups that I serve, and in the course of
>doing so, the output of the validator surprised me.

Then, again, I apologize for misreading you. My distinct impression — and I'll
happily concede this as my failure to understand rather than others' inability
to express it clearly — was that your primary concern was the supremacy of the
SysID in the Validator's entity resolution. Given that's not the case I fear
the majority of my output in this thread makes zero sense.


>>You'll note that the document cited as an example has been revised no
>>less than three times since first referenced here, and the SysID has
>>still not been corrected.
>
>Only because I haven't found time to capture the situation in a separate
>test file. Do you guys maintain regression tests somewhere?

  $CVSROOT/validator/htdocs/dev/tests/
  <http://validator.w3.org/dev/tests/>

There're existing tests for similar issues in «bogus-fpi.html» and
«bogus-fpi2.html». I thought we had a Bugzilla bug for this one, but I can't
find it by a quick scan of the open issues.


>>It hardly seems as if this was a particularly pressing problem
>>confounded by the current Markup Validator behaviour.
>
>Pressing or not, it's useful to report problems as I find them, no?

Very much, yes! Again, that was predicated on the assumption[0] that your
intent was «political» rather then technical; which made the lack of change a
«Statement» rather than (helpfully) providing a test case. The latter is
something we find lacking much too often, and are always very grateful for
when provided!

And since I've apparently misunderstood quite a lot in the thread, let me
emphasize that the fact of my arguing against any particular change suggested
or supported by WebArch, does not imply that reports of divergence from
WebArch are unwelcome!  Disagreeing with parts of the WebArch doc, or the
specific issue's releveance to any given change, does not mean I do not
appreciate being informed of them (as I'm sure everyone else on the Validator
team would).


Thanks for your feedback!


[0] — And, as I'm continually relearning,
        «Assumption is the Mother of All Fuckups!»
      if you'll pardon the french.

- -- 
"Hath no man's dagger here a point for me?"   - Leonato, Governor of Messina.
                   See Project Gutenberg <URL:http://promo.net/pg/> for more.

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Received on Thursday, 5 August 2004 15:15:09 UTC