- From: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk>
- Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:34:29 +0200
- To: www-validator@w3.org
David Dorward wrote:
[snip]
> Probably, it might involve writing a custom DTD to validate against,
> but probably. As previously mentioned, I've no idea how you are trying
> to implement them, and I've no idea what Dreamweaver does when you
> point and click the appropriate icons.
It does whatever it feels like doing :-( As one who has been
forced to migrate from HoTMetaL PRO to Dreamweaver, I can only
say that in my experienced this is a very retrograde step from
the perspective of validation. The Dreamweaver philosophy is
very simple, and arguably even defensible : to produce code that
will display "correctly" in as many current browsers as possible.
It pays no heed to DTDs, offers no facilities for its users to
/pick/ a DTD (although recent versions pay lip-service to the
support fo XHTML syntax), and in general is a tool intended for
those who are wish to treat web-page creation as an exercise
in aesthetic design rather than those who wish to treat it as
an exercise in document structuring.
I asked (private correspondence) recently what HTML editor /is/
recommended if one is concerned to produce only valid HTML, and
one correspondent referred me to "HTML-Kit"!
http://www.chami.com/html-kit/
I haven't had time since then to evaluate it, but I would be interested
in knowing if there is (to any list-member's knowledge) an HTML
editor which will (a) honour the DTD when modifying pre-existing documentss,
(b) allow the user creating a new document to pick a DTD, and (c)
generate only code which will validate against the specified DTD.
Amaya, in its current release, seems inexplicably tied to XHTML
syntax, even though the puff on the W3C page says
"supports HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, XHTML Basic, XHTML 1.1, HTTP 1.1,
MathML 2.0, many CSS 2 features, and includes SVG support"
Having downloaded and installed it, I find that the only
four document types which it can actually generate are
XHTML
MathML
SVG
CSS
which is pretty d@mned useless if one wants to write valid
HTML 4.01 pages ...
Philip Taylor
Received on Wednesday, 30 March 2005 09:35:31 UTC