Re: Error Message Feedback (custom DTD document)

Dear Charles,

On Jul 4, 2006, at 01:07 , Charles Robertson wrote:
> I am trying to validate my document and I am now getting one error,  
> which I cannot solve:
>
> Unknown Parse Mode!
> I am using a custom DTD at www.cdesign.me.uk/HTML4plus.dtd
>
> The page I am trying to validate is http://www.cdesign.me.uk/ 
> mendipmedia/index.htm

The message you quote is not an error, just a warning for documents  
using document types for which the validator can not determine  
whether they're HTML or XHTML based.

The fact that the validator (v0.7.2) claims that the document does  
not validate, however, is indeed a little strange - the development  
version seems happy with your document:

http://qa-dev.w3.org/wmvs/HEAD/check?uri=http%3A%2F% 
2Fwww.cdesign.me.uk%2Fmendipmedia%2Findex.htm

In any case, you should probably not serve said DTD with the Content- 
Type: text/xml. I'm not entirely certain, but if my memory serves me  
well, you should certainly serve the DTD as text/plain. I'm almost  
certain this is one of the things that make the validator's parser trip.

And finally, out of curiosity, why are you using a custom DTD? That  
should generally be avoided, unless you have a very good reason to  
use them - and even them, I would strongly recommend not exposing  
documents based on custom DTDs in the "public" internet, and keep  
them for internal usage...
(see http://www.alistapart.com/articles/customdtds2/ for more on the  
topic)

Hope this helps,
-- 
olivier

Received on Tuesday, 4 July 2006 05:27:36 UTC