- From: Philip TAYLOR <Philip-and-LeKhanh@Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org>
- Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 16:42:50 +0100
- To: www-validator@w3.org
When Netscape 4 was still ubiquitous, I created an augmented version of the HTML 4.01 DTD which added four attributes that Netscape required if the page were to be rendered correctly. Although the need for this is long past, the DTD is still used by a number of legacy pages, and I had occasion today to attempt to validate one. I was surprised when I was told : > 1. Warning Unable to Determine Parse Mode! > > It was not possible to reliably choose a parsing mode for this document, because: > * the MIME Media Type (text/html) can be used for XML or SGML document types > * the Document Type (-//PT//DTD HTML 4.01 Augmented//EN) is not in the validator's catalog > * No XML declaration (e.g <?xml version="1.0"?>) could be found at the beginning of the document. > > The validator is falling back to SGML mode. Apart from being less than certain that the statement "the MIME Media Type (text/html) can be used for XML" is true, I am more concerned that the validator is required to assume that a document sent as "text/html" and not containing an XML declaration could still nonetheless be XML, and therefore be forced to "unreliably" choose a parsing mode and issue a warning as a result ... Philip Taylor
Received on Monday, 24 September 2007 15:42:42 UTC