- From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis <bhawkeslewis@googlemail.com>
- Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2009 15:23:06 +0100
- To: Jeremy Lupoli <themathtutors@yahoo.com>
- CC: www-validator@w3.org
On 24/4/09 03:01, Jeremy Lupoli wrote: > Validating http://www.mayorsforkids.org/ > Error [108]: "there is no attribute X" > > I find it highly unusual that it won't validate Flash embedding. > Unfortunately,<embed> is still required by many browsers. Their > answer, to use SATAY (http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#faq-flash AND http://alistapart.com/articles/flashsatay) is > pretty ridiculous, especially if you're only grabbing a YouTube or > user-created content (so that you can't edit the Flash file itself). > This should be relegated to a warning, not an error. Many pages will > be unable to be validated otherwise. HTML 4.01 conformance includes validating to one of the HTML 4.01 SGML DTDs. Your document claims to conform to the http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd. It doesn't. The error message correctly reflects the fact. That decade-old DTD and the wider criteria of HTML 4.01 conformance are never going to be modified to add features rather than fix errata. Of course, just because you're not conforming doesn't mean you've made a mistake. In this, you're making a deliberate decision not to conform. Perhaps you should pick a conformance target that includes the features you want. If there isn't such a conformance target, that's not a problem with the validator; go lobby the people creating conformance targets (i.e. the HTML WG and XHTML 2 WG). As it happens, the current draft of HTML 5 includes the "embed" element: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#the-embed-element and the validator has experimental support for checking HTML 5. Be warned that unlike HTML 4.01, as a draft HTML 5 is a non-stable conformance target - just because your document conforms today, doesn't mean it will conform tomorrow. If you want to conform to HTML 4.01 with known exceptions (e.g. adding an element or attribute here and there), set up a linting process that checks that. For example, you could download the validator and make it use a custom DTD that includes "embed" when checking your HTML. Or you could simply take the validator output and make a script to strip out errors relating to your use of "embed". -- Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Received on Saturday, 25 April 2009 14:23:48 UTC