Re: [VE][247] Add Subject Here

2011-11-18 9:19, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> Here's the result of some iterations by Leif and me, intended to focus
> on the mismatch between authors' expectations and validator (rather than
> browser) behavior, which seems to be the heart of the matter:
>
> For the current document, the validator interprets strings like <FOO />
> according to legacy rules that break the expectations of most authors
> and thus causes confusing warnings and error messages from the
> validator. This interpretation is triggered by HTML 4 documents or other
> SGML-based HTML documents. To avoid the messages, simply remove the "/"
> character in such contexts. NB: If you expect <FOO /> to be interpreted
> as an XML-compatible "self-closing" tag, then you need to use XHTML or
> HTML5.

We suggest the following addition to our proposal above, after realizing 
that the warning is issued in situations quite different from the use of 
"self-closing" tags:

"This warning and related may also be caused by an unquoted
attribute value containing one or more "/". Example: <a
href=http://w3c.org>W3C</a>. In such cases, the solution is to put 
quotation marks around the value."

Yucca

P.S. By SGML rules, the first "/" terminates the _tag_, turning the rest 
of it to content characters. This may or may not result in error 
messages, e.g. about missing alt attribute when the author thinks there 
is one, as in <img src=foo/bar alt=x>. If there is another "/" too, it 
terminates the _element_, and this mostly causes error message, e.g. 
about missing </a> in the example in the proposed added text. As these 
are very confusing situations to people not familiar with SGML, I hope 
we can have the text added even though the explanation as a whole 
becomes longer than most other explanations.

Received on Monday, 21 November 2011 14:45:21 UTC