Re: More errors the validator should show

On Sat, 8 Oct 2005, Alex Tanner wrote:

> The validator should point out errors caused by using
> IE-specific Javascript commands (in this case
> "OpenBrWindow"):

No, definitely not. Whatever appears inside an event attribute is just 
character data as far as a DTD is concerned, and a validator by definition
checks whether a document conforms to the DTD or not. It would be 
incorrect to report an error if the document conforms to the DTD.

If you misspell an attribute name, a validator reports an error (unless
you misspell it in a way that turns it to another attribute defined for 
the element in the DTD). If you misspell anything inside an attribute
name when the attribute is declared as CDATA, a validator does not report
an error (except in rare cases that make the document violate generic
SGML or XML syntax).

Validation is formal, and formal in a very specific way, see
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/validation.html

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

Received on Monday, 10 October 2005 04:36:39 UTC