Re: suggest validator prefer URI to FPI

* Dominique Hazaël-Massieux wrote:
>Le mar 17/08/2004 à 16:23, Bjoern Hoehrmann a écrit :
>> The only reason I have heard in this thread to change the behavior of
>> the W3C MarkUp Validator in this regard is consistency with validating
>> XML processors that behave differently.
>
>Really? The main reason I've seen in this thread is to warn the user
>when she uses a bogus or inconsistent doctype; that's a user feature,
>not a theoretical one. 

I am opposed to change how the Validator locates a DTD from FPIs/SIs,
what it should do in order to figure out whether FPI and SI disagree
in some sense and how it should behave in that case in terms of feed-
back to the user is a different question.

>> >The Validator would notice that the System ID URI is not the one it
>> >associates by default to the FPI; depending on the feasibility of the
>> >different approaches, it could:
>> 
>> How would it notice that exactly?
>
>I imagine that there would be a catalog of FPI bound to System Ids; when
>validating a document, the Validator would absolutize the System ID, and
>see whether it matches the one associated to the FPI.

http://validator.w3.org/sgml-lib/xml.soc kindly demonstrates that
maintenance of the existing catalogs is quite difficult already...

>> Authors are deliberately and explicitly allowed to do that, it is
>> inappropriate for the Validator to suggest anything else and I am
>> afraid even if it is made an "info" users might be confused about it.
>
>Do you seriously believe that people that are going to put consciously a
>different system identifier would be confused by such a note?

It would not surprise me much, but that's only part of the story, it is
common that people use the Validator to validate other people's web site
and such users are much more likely to get confused. If the Validator
generates more noise for page X than for page Y, page X is less "valid"
then page Y, that's a quite common "confusion".

Received on Thursday, 19 August 2004 13:47:30 UTC