Re: [VE][66] Error Message Feedback

On Sun, 2004-08-22 at 14:44, Ray Mullan wrote:
> I am scripting a website in XHTML 1.1 Transitional

There is no such language.

> , this is the DTD:
> 
> <><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1 Transitional//EN" 
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

That DTD is the XHTML 1.0 Transitional DTD. Try picking a matching
public identifier:

http://www.w3.org/QA/2002/04/valid-dtd-list.html

> However I cannot validate any page where lists are nested 

Yes you can. You haven't shown any markup, but I bet you have tried to
place a list as a child element of another list (which is not allowed in
any version of (X)HTML). Only list items may be children of a list (but
a list may also be a child of a list item).

> -- in spite of carefully adhering to the CSS2 recommendations.

The CSS recommendations have no impact on what markup is valid. 

>  I should point out that 
> the page looks fine in Internet Explorer 6.0, Netscape 7, Opera 7 and 
> the latest version of Mozilla.

User agents often attempt to perform error correction to cope with
invalid documents. Depending on this is a bad idea.

>  After browsing the web, it would seem 
> that I am not the only web developer who has this problem -- many are of 
> the opinion that there is a glich in XHTML 1.1 since there appears to be 
> no way to nest lists according to CSS specifications and create valid 
> pages at the same time. Is this the case?

No.

> What are the implications for future interoperability if I ignore the 
> error messages?

I wouldn't like to try to predict the error correction capabilities of
future user agents. I'd also remain concerned about current user agents
which you have not tested.

-- 
David Dorward       <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/>   <http://dorward.me.uk/>

Received on Sunday, 22 August 2004 13:58:30 UTC