Re: [VE][247] Add Subject Here

2011-11-17 7:28, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:

> Jukka K. Korpela, Thu, 17 Nov 2011 01:06:38 +0200:
>> something like this:
>>
>> "A tag of the form <FOO />  is formally correct
>
> It is actually not a tag, per HTML4 - it is  tag plus a character ...

Right, I was thinking too much about the reader's idea of what it is.

> you know. Hence the current text says 'sequence'.

OK. Or maybe 'construct' would be suitable?

>> but should not be used in HTML (as opposite to XHTML).
>
> Please replace 'HTML' with 'HTML4', and please say 'XHTML and HTML5'.

Please may use the validator to check, say, HTML 3.2 documents, or 
documents with a custom DOCTYPE, which need not have anything to do with 
HTML 4. And "HTML (as opposite to XHTML)" includes HTML5 in HTML 
serialization and excludes HTML5 in XHTML serialization (or syntax).

>> The validator treats it very differently
>> from what you expect, and this causes many confusing error messages.
>
> This seems like the most important point. May be it should say 'treats
> it according to SGML rules, which in this particular case is quite
> different from what most developers/authors expect, and this causes
> confusing error messages.'

Sounds perfect to me.

>> Remove the '/' character."
>
> Here I would have written: In order to make the best use of the
> validator's HTML4 validation abilities, you should remove the '/'
> character, so as to not be disturbed by confusing error messages.

This has nothing particular to do with HTML 4 as opposite to other 
SGML-based versions of HTML. The message should be adequate, or at least 
non-misleading, even for a pure SGML document that has nothing to do 
with HTML, since the validator is capable of handling them (with 
restrictions), e.g.
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/test/sgml.html

I admit that the statement "Remove the '/' character" may sound rude and 
too direct, but it's really the most practical advice here (and I would 
put it first, really).

Perhaps it could be smoothened (and made more accurate) as follows:

"You should either remove the '/' character or convert the document as a 
whole to XHTML (or XML)."

Yucca

Received on Thursday, 17 November 2011 08:38:45 UTC