validator failed to spot error, that msie did not.

Hi,

I'm not sure if the validator is supposed to spot
this type of typo but any way heres my story...

I was writting a php app, that generated a table,
out of a loop. I used firefox and konqueror to check
it, and all seemed fine.

When I passed the code on, to whom it was for, they opened
it in msie and the page was very messed up.
(Column 3 of the table appeared before the table on the page)

So in debugging this, I ran the page through the validator,
and after fixing a few can not have <br> here errors
(by using style sheets to provide the spacing, has docs suggest)
I got:

"This Page Is Valid HTML 4.0 Strict!"

But msie was still rendering it incorrect, so I blamed Microsoft
(as you do... =)

But later I noticed, a silly typo.. a > was missing, I had "</TD"
and not </TD>.

I can understand firefox and konqueror correcting this, although
I wish you could disable that ability for testing. What I can
not understand is why the validator did not catch this.

</TD is not valid text (because of <), it is not a valid tag,
and every row in the table had an unclosed <TD>

Sorry if I am wrong in thinking that the validator should spot
this.

Thorben

Received on Friday, 19 November 2004 05:22:31 UTC