wrong error messages for SVG tiny 1.2 documents

Hello,

a longer time ago I already looked for a
possibility to check SVG tiny 1.2 documents.
The validator was not able to do this and 
either noted this correctly or checked only the
XML wellformdness, what was ok for me,
because I do not expect, that a simple
program is able to cover everything.

Now it provides wrong and confusing or even
stupid messages, because it is not able to
identify the version by simply looking at the
value of the version attribute.

I think, if the validator is not able to check
something without a doctype, it should simply
note this instead of confusing authors with
wrong or stupid messages ...

I think, this corresponds to the behaviour
for XHTML+RDFa, I reported already a 
longer time ago.
The validator gets more and more 
unreliable and less useful for authors,
if it starts to assume wrong versions,
drawing wrong conclusions and reporting
therefore nonsense, if there is no doctype 
in the document  anymore, but another version 
indication.


By the way: There often now appears this funny 
and confusing warning:
"Documents encoded as windows-1252 are often 
mislabeled as iso-8859-1, which is the declared 
encoding of this document."

I cannot understand the relevance, if the document
is correctly indicated using iso-8859-1. 
Doesn't this warning implicate an affront, that all authors 
of documents indicated as iso-8859-1 are stupid?
If such a parser finds characters which are suspicious
or typically not used in iso-8859-1 because they are
not presentable, but in windows-1252 they are, such
a warning might be useful, but if there are no such
characters I cannot see the sense of this warning other
then to annoy authors of documents encoded correctly
as iso-8859-1.


About all this problems it is indeed noted:
"The following notes and warnings highlight missing or conflicting information 
which caused the validator to perform some guesswork prior to validation. If 
the guess or fallback is incorrect, it could make validation results entirely 
incoherent. It is highly recommended to check these potential issues, and, if 
necessary, fix them and re-validate the document.

 Using experimental feature: validator.nu Conformance Checker.
...."

I checked the potential issues and found out that the results from the
validator are nonsense, especially it does not use the version indication
to guess something useful or simply to stop trying to validate documents
with unkown versions beyond the capabilities of the validator, instead the
advice is to remove the version indication at all (of course then the
situation is even worse and the validator will never have a chance to 
identify the used version correctly and the error messages will remain
useless and wrong anyway ;o)

Well how to fix the validator to avoid these errors? The documents
I used for the test are ok.
Or does is simply mean, that the experimental feature validator.nu 
just failed and that authors should be warned to use 
http://validator.w3.org/ in the near future until the experiment is 
finished?
Is it possible currently to switch back to the previous, more
reliable behaviour?





Best wishes


Olaf

Received on Tuesday, 8 September 2009 10:23:04 UTC