Re-sent : "Why does the CSS pass-through link from the W3C HTML validator cause the document to be validated against a specification that has not yet been formally adopted ?"

From: Philip TAYLOR <P.Taylor@Rhul.Ac.Uk> Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:33:30 +0000 Message-ID: <50A221FA.40304@Rhul.Ac.Uk> To: www-validator@w3.org, "www-validator-css@w3.org" <www-validator-css@w3.org> · This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Friday, 17 January 2020 22:59:31 UTC

When I ask the W3C HTML validator to validate an HTML document :

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://web-consultants.org.uk/tests/css-content.html

if that document is valid it offers me a pass-through link to validate
the same document for CSS conformance.

According to the W3C, only the following CSS specifications have
yet reached the status of a full W3C recommendation :

CSS Color Level 3     REC     REC     ℹ⃝
CSS Namespaces     REC     REC     ℹ⃝
Selectors Level 3     REC     REC     ℹ⃝
CSS Level 2 Revision 1     REC     REC     ℹ⃝
CSS Level 1     REC     –     ℹ⃝
Media Queries     REC     REC     ℹ⃝

Why, then, does the CSS validator assume that I want to
validate against the CSS 3 specification, which has not
yet reached full W3C recommendation status ?

A subsidiary question : the CSS validator reports that the
document is CSS 3-conformant, yet echoes only the stylesheet
information contained in the document <head> region; why
does it make no mention of the inline style(s) used ?

Philip Taylor