Suggestion: Do not complain about unknown attributes if tag not recognized

Whenever the markup validator (both 0.7.x and 0.8.0 Beta 2) encounters 
an unrecognized tag/element, the related error message is preceded by 
several misleading error messages that suggest useless corrective steps, 
which are potentially relevant only if the tag itself had been known to 
the validator.  I believe that these error messages are an artifact of 
the internal mechanisms of either the validator or opensp, they 
certainly do not reflect any aspect of the DTDs (which make no 
statements regarding the valid or invalid attributes of invalid tags).

As a usability improvement, I respectfully suggest that such error 
messages be omitted from the output, leaving only the error message that 
the entire tag/element was not recognized.

Sample document containing no other errors:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-us" 
xml:lang="en-us"><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso8859-15" />
<title>Test of validator reaction to unknown tags</title>
</head><body>
<BADTAG alt="this unknown tag takes an alt attribute" id="badtag1" 
class="mybad" height="7" width="8" style="" />
</body></html>



Jakob Bøhm
Developer
-- 
Danware Data A/S * Bregnerodvej 127 * DK-3460 Birkerod * Denmark
Tel. +45 4590 2533 * Direct +45 4590 2533

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Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 12:46:45 UTC