Mandatory doctype declaration for SVG validation: Please reconsider!

A couple of months ago, the W3C Markup Validation Service changed. It
now refuses to even look at an SVG 1.0 or SVG 1.1 document unless the
document either includes a doctype declaration, or a box is checked on
the Validator page that simulates the presence of such a declaration
in the document. This novel requirement is causing all the issues that
the doctype declaration has always been known to cause in validation.
I would kindly request that the Validator be returned to its former
behaviour in which a doctype declaration was not a mandatory
requirement for validation!

Allow me to flesh out this request with a bit of detail.

When a conventional document in SVG 1.0 or SVG 1.1 format is submitted
to the W3C Markup Validation Service now, the Validator declines to
check it: "Sorry! This document cannot be checked." This piece of
information is complemented by a verbose yet impenetrable error
message: "External Checker not available. Checking the Document Type
of this document requires the help of an external tool which was
either not enabled in this validator, or is currently unavailable.
Check in the validator's system configuration that HTML5 Validator is
enabled and functional.The error encountered was: 429 Too Many
Requests'.

The actual issue does not become clear until one selects the SVG 1.0
or SVG 1.1 option from the Doctype menu and presses the Revalidate
button. The document now passes the validation, but only
'tentatively', because, as the warning states: 'even if no errors are
shown below the document will not be Valid until you add the new
DOCTYPE Declaration.'

There is a misunderstanding in this warning, however: In the
Validator's novel behaviour, there is no 'new DOCTYPE Declaration'
required. The old declaration will do perfectly fine, but it is _newly
required_ now.

And this is where things get problematic.

The most recent release of the SVG 1.1 Specification (Second Edition)
of 2011 explicitly recommends against the use of a doctype
declaration, due to the known issues created by such a declaration
when the document is checked for validation: 'While a DTD is provided
in this specification, the use of DTDs for validating XML documents is
known to be problematic. In particular, DTDs do not handle namespaces
gracefully. It is not recommended that a DOCTYPE declaration be
included in SVG documents.'[1]

Given its prior stance, how can the W3C suddenly swerve around and
make the doctype declaration mandatory for SVG validation? This change
not only breaks a longstanding consensus, it breaks the validation of
a huge amount of legacy code. It also breaks them in a big way, as
every bit of code outside the SVG namespace (RDF, Dublin Core,
Creative Commons,vendor-specific attributes), which previously went
unchecked, now triggers an error, leading to a massive inflation of
the errors reported.

Revoking the mandatory addition of a doctype declaration would return
SVG validation to its previous sanity!

Kind regards

Rudolf Ammann
Graphic Designer
Switzerland

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[1] <https://www.w3.org/TR/SVG11/intro.html>

Received on Friday, 11 October 2024 13:41:46 UTC