Re: [VE][76] This message is preceded by nine useless messages

http://home.earthlink.net/~silvermaplesoft/demos/embed.htmlPerhaps this 
trimmed down page will satisfy both Michael Adams and Frank Ellerman, who 
wrote> It's an idea for XHTML and XML, but for HTML it's less
> obvious what "next element" means after an unknown tag.

> And for XHTML, if you have <dig> ... </div>, "next"
> could be the end of file, because there is no </dig>.With the correct 
> </div> instead of the </dig> in this example, there are only ten errors --  
> the nine I have labeled as useless and lastly the real error of a 
> non-extanttag. The </dig> introduces three additional errors. Revalidating 
> as either 4.01 strict or transitional produces the expected errors about 
> XHTML issues but otherwise changes nothing.In all scenarios, parsing 
> appears to resume perfectly adequately with <div id="main">. And while 
> HTML can get away without closing some tags, the parser seems to have an 
> adequate idea of what "next element" means.As a former compiler writer 
> (USAF ADA contract), I am well aware of the difficulties of error 
> recovery. But I fail to understand how ignoring the attributes of an 
> element could possibly affect the parse stream. Either way it must find a 
> closing ">" to the element and then continue parsing. As it reads the 
> attributes it knows they are invalid precisely because it already knows 
> the element is invalid and all it's really doing is looking for that 
> bloody ">" so it can get on with the show. Does this clarify/simplify the 
> issue?R. W. Crowl

Received on Wednesday, 2 July 2008 07:29:19 UTC