Re: XTHML 1.0 Strict validation of noscript

On Sun, 15 Oct 2006, Rui del-Negro wrote:

>> jkorpela@cs.tut.fi wrote:
>> 
>> It is advisable to drop the "<!--" stuff, which is nothing
>> but useless technobabble copied from old documents and no
>> books. [...] Far from protecting anything, the technobabble
>> creates a pointless risk.
>
> Well, they use it at w3schools:

One more reason to be skeptical about that site, which looks (perhaps 
intentionally) a bit like as if it were affiliated with the W3C but isn't.

>> The real reason is that you have <noscript> inside a <p> element.
>> That's not allowed.
>
> But a <script> is?

Yes.

> Considering that in 99% of cases a <noscript> will be used to provide an
> alternative to the output of a <script>, why allow one and not the other?

Beats me. But that's _not_ a validator issue.

>> The INS and DEL elements
>> must not contain block-level content
>
> And in this case it doesn't.

Actually, it would have to.

> The contents of the <noscript> block in this
> case is all inline (text and / or an image). But I agree about the
> semantics. Or do you mean <noscript> is block?

Bingo. That's what the DTD says.

> Wouldn't it be simpler for validators to simply ignore the <noscript> tags

No. A validator would not be a validator if it did not check syntactic 
correctness by SGML or XML rules using whatever DTD the document 
specifies. A validator as such does not know anything about the meaning or 
intended use of any tag. It's job is _purely_ syntactic.

> as a general rule I don't like to use JavaScript to modify element
> contents,

So how _do_ you use JavaScript to insert the user name? The only other way 
I can imagine is document.write, which is _not_ allowed when using XHTML.
(See http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/2004/xhtml-faq#docwrite )

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

Received on Sunday, 15 October 2006 21:47:21 UTC