Re: Validation of apostrophe

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, richard Eskins wrote:

> As you saw (I will be removing the file validated), this was a student 
> exercise in which they create a page in a lab based test.
> The final step is to validate the page. I'll just have to stress next 
> year that this must be done via Upload, not the Direct Input.

I was first a bit worried about upload, too, since in practice browsers do 
not include character encoding information in the submitted form data. 
After all, they really cannot. They usually deal with files in 
environments where no encoding information is attached at the file system 
level.

However, the W3C validator seems to honor the encoding declared in a 
<meta> tag and will correctly report e.g. octet 146 decimal as error when 
the encoding is declared as iso-8859-1 and approve it when the encoding is 
windows-1252.

On the other hand, the validator uses UTF-8 as the default encoding, which 
is most a wrong guess at present. For documents containing ASCII only, 
this is not a problem, but the warning probably confuses the user. And if 
there are non-ASCII character, there can be quite some confusion.

Thus, if you ask students to use the file upload feature, you should tell 
them that <meta> tags for character encoding are needed because
a) that's the Right Thing in situations where message headers (such as 
HTTP headers) cannot be used
b) that'll avoid getting confusing messages due to the default applied.

Ideally, files should be uploaded on a server and validated using the 
validator's primary interface, via a URL.

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

Received on Friday, 16 February 2007 13:25:55 UTC