Re: W3C Validator vs Schneegans

Christoph Schneegans wrote:

 [redirection]
> intentional. This way you can validate redirect or error pages

Makes sense, I was only a bit surprised by the error message
for <http://purl.net/xyzzy/lab.htm> - it found an "invalid"
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> for the 302.

Something's odd there, my own funny "2.0 strict" test page
gets the same "error", but AFAIK it's correct.  Maybe you need
a better error message, e.g. "for XML or XHTML only, stupid".

>> insists on UTF-8 for all documents without XML-encoding

> Absolutely not, it complies with
> <http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_9> for "text/html"

Then something with my page (see above) is not as you expect it,
maybe you don't like the "system identifier" (that's an absolute
validator.w3.org/sgml-lib URL).  No problem for this page, it's
us-ascii, but confusing for windows-1252 (hex. %80 Euro) etc.

>> it told me that if I try post-modern stuff like <fieldset>
>> it MUST begin with <legend>.

> That's correct, see
> <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html-editor/2002JulSep/0105.html>.

The author says about the DTD:  "We had to make it optional
because of the incapability of DTD mechanism".  The precise
number of DTDs I've written is zero, but the XHTML DTDs do
manage it to say "title is required (somewhere in the head)",
and the xml2rfc DTD also manages similar tricks.  Therefore...

> Because XML DTDs can't express such a constraint.

...I don't get this point.  E.g. this line in the xml2rfc DTD:

<!ELEMENT postal      (street+,(city|region|code|country)*)>

validator.w3.org accepts this, and it told me that I need a
street, until I added <street></street> in my document.  So
where's the problem with (old)...

<!ELEMENT fieldset (#PCDATA | legend | %block; | form | %inline; | %misc;)*>

...vs. (new)...

<!ELEMENT fieldset ( legend, (#PCDATA | %block; | form | %inline; | %misc;)*)>

As "validator-fan" for years I'm a bit angry if it's attacked
only because the XHTML DTDs are sloppy (?).  Bye, Frank

Received on Monday, 5 September 2005 08:53:29 UTC