Re: Feedback on WWW Validator

On 11 Sep 2007, at 01:07, Dan Short wrote:

> I do not think that I agree with that.

It is fact, not opinion.

> My form is used to enter snippets of HTML for later retrieval and  
> formatting with a PHP script. The browser does not interpret the  
> HTML tags within the textarea, but simply renders the text of the  
> tags within the textarea as written.

Browsers perform error recovery.
The validator tests against the DTD.

If you want to compare your code against the ability of various  
browsers to parse it, then test it in browsers (of course, to test in  
every browser that exists, with all their different abilities to  
recover from errors, is a very time consuming task). If you want to  
compare it against the standard (or at least that part of it which is  
expressed in the DTD), then use the validator.

> I do not see any reason that any kind of text at all should not be  
> allowed within the textarea.

The specification doesn't allow "any kind of text at all".

> The page containing the form with the textarea validates as XHTML  
> 1.0 Strict when the form is empty, but the validator rejects it  
> when the textarea within the form happens to contain some HTML tags.

That is because it is invalid.

-- 
David Dorward
http://dorward.me.uk/
http://blog.dorward.me.uk/

Received on Tuesday, 11 September 2007 08:22:15 UTC