Re: Error Message Feedback

On Fri, 23 Dec 2005, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:

> * Wolf wrote:
>> I have question regarding validating mechanism. How I may use
>> <noindex></noindex> tags according to XHTML 1.1 standart? These tags are
>> often useful for search engines by compels validator to generate errors.
>> Wiil be very grateful for suggestion.
>
> W3C decided to deprecate the isindex element so it's included only in
> XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.0 Frameset. You can't use it in XHTML
> 1.1 documents.

But the question was about <noindex>, not <isindex>.

The <noindex> markup was never part of any HTML specification. It is 
rarely used and little known, except perhaps among authors who use the 
Atomz search on their pages; see
http://www.atomz.com/applications/search/faq.htm#150
The idea is to exclude part of a document from indexing. It is odd
that Atomz designers decided to invent a tag instead of using
something that complies with official HTML syntax, such as a predefined
class attribute or pseudocomment.

There's no way to make a document using <noindex> comply with any 
published HTML specification even syntactically. If you would like
to make a document valid, though with a "nonstandard" DOCTYPE,
you could add a block-level <index> element into a suitable
"standard" DOCTYPE for HTML. Actually <noindex> is probably meant to
act as markup that can be used both at block level and at text level,
and XML DOCTYPEs cannot express such things - you would have to upgrade to 
SGML, and you could start then from an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE and add a 
definition that is similar to DEL and INS element definitions.
That means you would change the declaration of BODY to

<!ELEMENT BODY O O (%block;|SCRIPT)+ +(INS|DEL|NOINDEX) -- document body -->

and add the declaration

<!ELEMENT NOINDEX - - (%flow;)*>

Regarding the use of custom DTDs, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/own-dtd.html

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Friday, 23 December 2005 08:31:00 UTC