Re: http-equiv="refresh" redirects ignored in markup validator

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 1 May 2007, Kati wrote:
> 
>> It would be nice if the validator just took a glance at the META 
>> refresh directive.
> 
> No, that would be quite incorrect. A validator is supposed to check the 
> conformance of a document against the DTD it purports to comply with. 
> Nothing more, nothing less. It is quite agnostic about the meaning of 
> any element.
> 


No. A validator can do quite a bit more than that. While a pure XML 
validator might only check against a DTD, an *HTML* validator should 
check a document for conformance to the HTML specification. This 
specification(s) has some constraints that are not and indeed cannot be 
expressed in a DTD. For instance, there is the constraint that a 
elements are not nested.

I am not sure if the META refresh directive is defined in the spec, but 
if it is we should check it.

If it's not, we might still want to check it if there is a decent spec 
for that element and consensus on what should be there. The validator 
already checks some accessibility issues that are not spelled out in the 
  HTML spec. We could check this too.


-- 
Elliotte Rusty Harold  elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published!
http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2007 11:28:45 UTC