Re: Bug while validating a web page

Patricia Bouyer wrote:
> While using the validator for debugging a web site, I have found a bug 
> in the HTML validator (or at least I think so).

   "Nothing wrong with the validator here, it just knows HTML
    better than you do." -- David Dorward

> The error concerns the tag for closing a table. I had written </TABLE instead of </TABLE> on my 
> web page,

It's called an unclosed-tag.  The '>' can be omitted in certain 
circumstances, such as when followed by another start- or end-tag.

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.7

So, for example, the following is valid:

   <p<em>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.</em>
....^

(Note the missing '>')

But this is not:

   <p The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

> and this had a buggy behaviour on some navigators (like opera 
> or safari, but not firefox). However, the page was validated as "Valid 
> HTML 4.01 Transitional".

The fact that browsers have bugs has no impact on the validity of a 
document, despite the fact that such bugs may have practical implications.

-- 
Lachlan Hunt
http://lachy.id.au/

Received on Thursday, 3 November 2005 05:42:58 UTC