Re: IMG missing right bracket should not validate

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, olivier Thereaux wrote:

> On Sep 21, 2007, at 23:59 , David Dorward wrote:
>> Possibly the validator should issue a warning when it encounters this, 
>> since it is one of the features of HTML 4 mentioned as having limited 
>> support that authors should avoid using: 
>> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/appendix/notes.html#h-B.3.7
>
> Ironically perhaps, I recall this was what Terje attempted to implement with 
> "fussy parsing", which was slammed by users on this very mailing list.

As far as I remember, the problem was the idea of making the parsing 
itself something different from the kind of SGML parsing required by HTML 
4, instead of just issuing warnings _in addition to_ doing the very job 
that a validator is supposed to do.

Or maybe it was just the implementation, especially making the validator 
explicitly claim that a document is invalid when it is in fact valid.

> I can look into switching on warnings for shorttags again.

There is no problem with issuing warnings as long as they do not contain 
incorrect information and do not affect the validation process. But I'm 
afraid this requires more than switching something on.

The validator at http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ has had the 
option of issuing warnings (related to shorttag issues) for years, and I 
never saw anyone complain about that. It's even "on" by default. But it 
works in a non-disruptive manner. In this case it says

Line 16, character 1:
<P>
^
Warning: unclosed start-tag

One needs to look at the markup before the indicated point in order to see 
what might be the issue, but that's unavoidable, due to the nature of the 
formal syntax rules of HTML 4.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2007 06:33:37 UTC