- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2004 23:42:43 +0200 (EET)
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: www-validator@w3.org
On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Ian Hickson wrote: > On Sat, 3 Jan 2004, Jukka K. Korpela wrote: > > > > That verbal statement has no impact on validation, which is a purely > > formal operation that must not pay attention to any attempts to use prose > > to impose restrictions not expressed in a DTD. In fact, it must not even > > see such attempts - it must be blind to anything outside the formal > > part of the DTD. > > I'm curious as to why you say "must" here. Because otherwise it would not be validation, by definition. > A page that validates according to the DTD but does not follow the > restrictions of the HTML spec is not valid -- It is. Being valid means conformance to the given DTD. > so why does restricting the > validator to the subset of the conditions that are describable by an SGML > DTD a good idea? Well, that's what validity means in SGML (and XML). It is much better to use other words to describe compliance to something else. If you use "valid" and "validator" in a loose sense, as many people do, then you will lack an expression to what those words mean the SGML context. You will not be able to distinguish them from everyone's and his dog's rules for what is "valid" and what is not. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Saturday, 3 January 2004 16:42:49 UTC