Re: "Unknown Parse Mode!" when validating with DOCTYPE chosen to force STRICT mode in Mozilla

L. David Baron wrote:

> The goal of DOCTYPE sniffing was that newly-written pages should be in
> standards mode and old pages should be in quirks mode.  In other words,
> DOCTYPE sniffing was used as a heuristic to determine which pages were
> written after Mozilla became a known user-agent on the Web (as I wrote
> in the URL you cite).  Since pages with SYSTEM doctype declarations were
> not common on the Web around 2001, such pages are treated as pages
> written with knowledge of Mozilla's existence, and are therefore handled
> in standards mode.

OK, understood.  Unfortunately it doesn't help in the present situation,
as use of a SYSTEM doctype unfortunately  confuses the validator and
causes it not to know whether to use an SGML or XML parsing model :-(

What a shame that the W3C and the major browser vendors can't agree
on something like a head-region pragmat to trigger standards mode,
maybe along the lines of

	<!-- #PRAGMAT mode="Full-standards" -->
	<!-- #PRAGMAT mode="Almost-standards" -->
	<!-- #PRAGMAT mode="Quirks" -->

Philip Taylor.