Re: Odd warning for esoteric DTD

Philip TAYLOR wrote:
 
>>    1.  Warning Unable to Determine Parse Mode!
[...]
>>       The validator is falling back to SGML mode.

Yes, I get a similar result when I try to validate
<http://purl.net/xyzzy/home/test/res.html>, and in
that case the "esoteric" DTD is nothing less than
the famous RFC 2070 HTML i18n, i.e. the first HTML
version based on Unicode, and the last HTML version
developed in the IETF (before the W3C took over).

OTOH if the validator doesn't know a "FPI" (that's
the stuff between "PUBLIC" and systen ID in the
DOCTYPE declaration), then it's forced to guess
what's going on:  text/html can be XHTML 1.0 plus
variants needing the XML-parser, it can be also
HTML 2..4 needing an SGML-parser.  Or it could be
a HTML 5 DTD in need of the WhatWG, but I digress.

> 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

That's how it is for XHTML 1.0, intentionally, for
backwards compatibility.  In theory you can create
your own XHTML 1.0 variant with stuff like <embed>,
and let your Web server send it as text/html.  The
DTD would be very similar to what you have.  Then
the warning would make sense, you'd get again SGML
mode, but what you'd then really want is XML mode.

Frank
-- 
http://omniplex.blogspot.com/2007/09/html-public-ietf-html-i18nen.html

Received on Monday, 24 September 2007 16:28:58 UTC