Re: Port number in Link in HTML5

Henri Sivonen wrote:

> The HTML5 validator treats URI/IRI RFC 'security considerations'
> violations as errors.

What has a "HTML5 validator" got to do with a markup validator?

> Surely a validator for language X should report errors that are errors
> according to specs normatively referenced by the spec of X?

Surely not. An SGML or XML validator has a well-defined job, and it must not 
report anything as an error if it does not violate syntactic requirements 
expressed in a certain formalism.

Nothing but confusion arises from calling miscellaneous linters as 
"validators", in a context where validators in a well-defined meaning are 
available and in use.

> (Note that
> what actually is normative about referencing IRI specs is a bit in
> flux right now, and the validator isn't quite up to date when the
> document isn't encoded as UTF-8.)

Can an incomplete draft, with "issue notes" and all that, make normative 
references? A draft that explicitly says that it is not stable?

> The idea is that the errors reported by the HTML5 validator are backed
> up by the HTML5 spec or its normative references (though the spec
> doesn't have a proper reference section yet).

There is no HTML5 specification.

>> This is absurd, since it would mean that port numbers like 80 (the
>> default for http URLs) and 8080 should not be used, since they are
>> definitively "well known". So I would deduce that the error message
>> says just the opposite of what its creators meant to say: port
>> numbers _should be_ "well known".
>
> 8080 is above 1023 and, thus, is not 'well-known'. 80 is redundant,
> since it's the default port for the http scheme.

This is getting more and more absurd. You seem to be saying that the message 
uses "well known" about ports in some privately defined meaning that 
completely differs from the meaning of the term "well known" in IANA 
vocabulary and practice.

> If by 'markup validator proper', you mean a "validating SGML parser"
> per ISO 8879, I suggest upgrading your use of the word to the ISO/IEC
> FDIS 19757-2 definition of "validator".

Why would I do that?

Any "upgrade" (i.e., change of established meaning for a term) that I would 
make in my mind would not change the problem: confusion arising from calling 
completely different operations as "validation".

I understand that the word "validator" has some market value. Many people 
know how a certain defective, highly subjective HTML checker has been sold 
as "HTML Validator" for years. I understand that authors want to think that 
"validation" is something that proves that a document is "valid" in some 
absolute sense - not as relative to certain syntax descriptions and their 
formalism, as real validators do.

Ultimately it would have been better if the term "validation" had not been 
coined in the SGML context. But it was.

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

Received on Wednesday, 3 June 2009 18:19:00 UTC