Web validator bug: doesn't catch unquoted href value

Hi,

I noticed a bit of a problem in the web validator.  The following page 
does not trigger the desired error message:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
                       "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<title>Test</title>
</head>
<body>

<a href=http://validator.w3.org/>Test</a>

</body></html>


The key bit is the unquoted url in the anchor tag.  I would have 
expected the message "an attribute value must be a literal unless it 
contains only name characters".  Instead, it does not complain about 
the opening tag's characters, and it uses the final slash to close the 
anchor tag.  Instead, I get a "end tag for element 'A' which is not 
open" message.

I'm sorry that I don't have time to submit more than a bug report at 
the moment; hopefully this will sufficiently interest someone else to 
work on a patch.

Thanks for a great application!
Jeremiah Morris

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2004 10:59:31 UTC