Re: Validator complains because it cannot determine validation mode from document type

Shane McCarron wrote:
> When attempting to validate this, the validator complains that the
> referenced DOCTYPE, admittedly a private, contrived markup language that
> the validator does not know about explicitly, is being served as
> text/html and it cannot decide how to parse it.

Which is unsurprising since you should not serve private, contrived XML
dialects as text/html (Appendix C XHTML has caused enough problems
already).

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-media-types/#summary

SHOULD NOT is RFC 2119 speak for (to paraphrase) "Don't do this unless
you understand and are comfortable with the consequences".

SGML and tag soup slurpers having issues is such a consequence. Having
"]>" render at the top of the document in my browser of choice is
another consequence. Making the W3C look like numpties who write
specifications (like RFC 2854) and then fail to follow them is another
consequence.

The application/xml MIME Type exists for this sort of thing. Hacking
quality assurance tools to ignore the specification is not as good a
solution as following the specification.

> Now... I know that I could change the rules so that a requestor who
> accepts application/xhtml+xml would get the document with that media
> type, but...  I think of the document starts off with an "xml"
> declaration, e.g., <?xml ... ?>, then the validator should assume that
> the document is to be validated in XML mode. 

If clients are going to sniff the document to decide how to handle it,
then it renders the Content-Type header pointless. The Content-Type
header, however, handles the issue far more elegantly (exposing the
information to HEAD requests for example).


-- 
David Dorward                               <http://dorward.me.uk/>

Received on Thursday, 5 April 2007 21:33:30 UTC