Validator going 500 Time out with XHTML 1.1 docs (Was: Validator Server Error 505 is not correct)

On Jun 24, 2007, at 03:51 , David L. Greene wrote:
> My Web page:
> Has Validator links at the bottom of every page but, when used, the
> validator "says" there is a server error 505.

500, actually. This means "server error". It's a tough one to  
diagnose, it took me a number of retries to finally get that error.  
Most of the times, at least, validation performs fine.

I tracked the error 500 to a timeout. In other words, in some  
circumstances the validator just takes too long validating your page,  
and the web server that controls it decides to kill the validation  
process. What takes so long, I'm not certain. I guess either:
* network problems between your server and the validator's
* since you are using XHTML 1.1 (the modular version of XHTML),  
validation implies fetching a large-ish number of DTD and entities  
files from www.w3.org, and unfortunately some of the www.w3.org web  
mirrors these days get slowed down by broken bots, broken software  
and computer attacks.

A few tests with other XHTML 1.1 pages show some very slow  
validation, so I am suspecting the latter. Will look into it further.

Received on Sunday, 24 June 2007 22:52:45 UTC