Re: Relaxed - new HTML validation service based on RELAX NG + Schematron

* Henri Sivonen wrote:
>  * Doctype and schemaLocation are design bugs, because the document 
>that is being assessed sets its own rules instead of the document being 
>assessed being subject to rules set by the person assessing the 
>technical quality of the document.

That's both good and bad. "Versioning" is a reality and its often
possible to determine the defnite rules with respect to standards
compliance solely based on the document. There may be stricter
rules imposed at a higher level, but it is not feasible to require
users to select a specific schema each and every time they want
to validate something. I have text/html documents in HTML 4.01
Strict, Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.0 Strict,
XHTML 1.1, and so on, if I had to manually select the version each
time I want to check whether the documents conform to the rules I
want to comply with, I'd use better tools than the one that requires
me to manually select this in the user interface.

>  * RELAX NG (Schematron too) fixes the bug: the RELAX NG validation 
>process takes two independent inputs: the document and the schema.

This is no different from DTDs really, that most tools are only
able to tell whether an SGML or XML document is "valid" per the
rules in the DTD and the internal subset and such is an API bug;
not all toolkits have this bug.

>  * If validator.w3.org adds RELAX NG support in response to what the 
>SVG WG is doing, it would be nice if the two-input nature of the 
>process was preserved and not regressed to the DTD ways by using 
>heuristic schema association.

You would likely be able to use the Validator as a general purpose
RELAX NG Validator but it's unlikely you will be required to select
the schema for each validation. It's not just the authors who want
to check a document, it's also customers of web design companies
who want to check whether their produce proper code, and not all
customers are aware of all the technical details relevant here.

No matter what the UI is, if you want to cheat, you can always do
it; in fact, people already use e.g. scripting to work around the
validator so they can have invalid and validator-approved code at
the same time. That's worrying indeed, the tools are there to help
people write and use better code, not to frown upon people who make
educated decisions to ignore them. From some perspective that would
be nice, but it just does not work in practise.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Weinh. Str. 22 · Telefon: +49(0)621/4309674 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Wednesday, 31 August 2005 00:13:30 UTC