Errors in MarkUp Validator, Release 0.6.5

I have been using both the MarkUp validator and the CSS Validator for more than a year - most of the time with great satisfaction. But the recent upgrade to 0.6.5 is disappointing I'm sorry to say.

I'm glad that the validation service is undergoing development, and I think that some of the announced improvements are very good - but the problem is that some of these improvements doesn't seem to work. Another problem is that important options on the revalidate page are now gone.

The last thing first. Consider the following page: http://www.gyros.dk/nodtd.html

This page lacks a doctype declaration and a charset encoding, but is otherwise valid xhtml. With the old validator I would get an error message telling me that the validator could not find at charset definition, and the validator would then let me specify a charset override. The new validator gives another error message - telling me that the document cannot be validated because it contains bytes that can't be interpreted as utf-8. I might be o.k. that the validator automatically guesses "utf-8" when a charset definition is missing, but it is a major problem that the validator fails to give me an option to revalidate with charset override. I get "Revalidate with options" and a small list of checkbuttons, but the must important revalidate options - doctype and charset options are hidden. Why is that?

Now concerning the error.
On the detailed validation page - http://validator.w3.org/detailed.html - it is now possible to specify "fallback instead of override". The options are explained in the help page. But the fallback options does not work as the help text explains.

Try to validate the following page without specifying any extra options: http://gyros.dk/usenet/

The page should validate without problems.

Now try specifying fallback to HTML 4.01 Transitional. The validation should - if I understand the help text correctly - still pass, since the fallback doctype should only be used if the page fails to specify one. But the result is the following: 

	No DOCTYPE Found! Falling Back to HTML 4.01 Transitional

And if one puts a mark in "show source" - the original XHTML doctype is magically gone!

Another error. Choose another doctype as fallback - i.e. XHTML 1.0 Transitional - and validate. Once again you get:

	No DOCTYPE Found! Falling Back to HTML 4.01 Transitional

So not only has the validator "eaten" the original doctype, it also fails to use the specified fallback type. No matter what doctype I choose as fallback, the validator uses HTML 4.01 Transitional.

The encoding option works a bit better - but still not correct. If I choose fallback to utf-8, the validation uses an override to utf-8.


The new possibilities with the validator would be very welcome if they worked - but for now I would be happier if I could use the old validator.

Regards
Jens Gyldenkaerne Clausen

Received on Wednesday, 12 May 2004 13:09:46 UTC