Re: some things that w3c validator could warn/complain about (mostly XHTML interoperability issues)

Hi Christian,

On 8 nov. 07, at 00:02, Christian Steinert wrote:
> - empty class="" attribute does not seem to be allowed, but is not  
> reported by the validator

Empty class attribute wouldn't make sense, but I don't see any clear  
mention, either in the prose or in the machine-readable schemas that  
would make that forbidden. Do you have a reference stating that it  
would not be allowed.

> - HTML-comments inside of CSS and script tags are legal XHTML, but  
> will cause content to be ignored by XHTML-conformant browsers

I don't really see what's the problem with that. Could you give  
details or examples?

> - tags with non-empty content model in HTML4 should be closed  
> explicitly in XHTML to ensure interoperability; the validator could  
> warn in such situations when validating XHTML
> (e.g. <a id="foo" name="foo"></a> and not <a id="foo" name="foo" />)

That's the job for the HTML compatibility checker, which is yet to be  
integrated into the validator indeed. I'd love to get some help on  
this. Anyone interested?

> - named HTML entities like &copy; are legal in XHTML when  
> specifiying a DTD, but a non-validating browser is free to ignore  
> the DTD and thus not know them; thus when using named entities  
> except &gt; / &lt; / &quote; / &amp; in XHTML, the validator should  
> warn

True, named entities can be an issue in an XML toolset. I'm wondering  
how we could make such warnings useful and not confusing. Quite  
frankly, I can imagine some XHTML authors, simply authoring for  
browser consumption, being very puzzled if given a warning about  
perfectly legit entities...

Regards,
-- 
olivier

Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2007 00:26:39 UTC