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

Dear Oliver, Dear everybody
> 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.
Sorry, seems like I am mistaken with regards to that. I think some other 
validator complained about  this, but it seems then that this is not  
invalid, so the validator should accept it.

>
>> - 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?
yes, just like Jukka K Korpela mentioned, I mean stuff like

<script><!--
function iAmInvisiblenInXmlParsingMode() { 
  //...
}
--></script>

I would not warn about things like this in HTML doctype, but this also 
an xhtml compatibility issue and might be more well-placed in an 
interoperability module as well. The problem is that some people must be 
expected to contiue with this practice in XHTML doctypes (and it may 
even "work" for as long as they serve it as text/html). And in this 
case, the validator might people that they may have an issue here.

The problem is that "warnings" would break the easy and clear 
"valid"/"invalid" distinction and I maybe this is a good thing to do in 
the main validator - it may turn people off, if they perceive the 
checker to give "fuzz" answers. So it's probably more well-placed in a 
group of interoperability-related checks for xhtml.

>> <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.
True, it would be more well-placed there, because it doesn't make 
documents invalid XHTML.

> I'd love to get some help on this. Anyone interested?
I would love to, but I don't have the time (which is the reason why I 
hesitated about writing to the list at all - it's always easy to have 
"good ideas" without wanting to help). Sorry.
>> - 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...
This is quite true. It just feels a bit "dirty" for me that this 
scenario is possible, but probably it's a non-issue in normal UAs.
>
> Regards,
Many thanks & Regards
Christian

Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2007 12:07:20 UTC