Does "transitional" and/or "xhtml" hide errors?
in [CSS]
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From: Alan Illeman on 16 Jun 2010 20:52 My neighbour asked if I could examine his website.. . http://www.glennmiddleton.ca/ ...and initially I found many HTML, CSS warnings and errors. Also " " had been used to excess, imo. Through my neighbour I contacted his host who replied.. "..thank you for bringing this to my attention. The html template I was using is one that I have had for awhile, and haven't been keeping it up to date as web standards have changed. Anyhow, I have recoded it based on today's web standards and it now passes validation. Aside from the template, the actual content of each page is generated via a WYSIWYG plugin (xinha) within the CMS which outputs the HTML. This allows him to update his own content. For that reason, some of the html (eg. excessive use of ) is beyond my control." ...and, sure enough, there are now no HTML errors. I downloaded the source of my neighbour's page, stripped out the xhtml and 'transitional' and inserted 'strict' (as it is in my genealogy webpage at http://www3.bell.net/alanji/illeman.htm). But when I tried to validate the HTML using.. http://validator.w3.org/#validate-by-upload ...many errors were present (many silly errors too, imo). So, does "transitional" and/or "xhtml" hide the errors that 'strict' and 'html4' alone would find? tia Alan
From: Andy Dingley on 16 Jun 2010 20:59 On 17 June, 01:52, "Alan Illeman" <no...(a)nowhere.ca> wrote: > So, does "transitional" and/or "xhtml" hide the errors that > 'strict' and 'html4' alone would find? Sort of, although "hide" is wrong. This site _is_ XHTML Transitional, so validating it as if it were something else is an obvious error. There's XML syntax around empty elements and there are even <font> tags in there. Both of these are errors under HTML Strict. The markup is poor and both XHTML or Transitional are bad ideas, but that doesn't make them definitively "wrong".
From: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn on 16 Jun 2010 21:38 Alan Illeman wrote: > My neighbour asked if I could examine his website.. . > http://www.glennmiddleton.ca/ > ..and initially I found many HTML, CSS warnings and errors. > Also " " had been used to excess, imo. Unfortunately, the latter is one of many semantical problems that a syntax validator cannot reveal. > Through my neighbour I contacted his host who replied.. > > "..thank you for bringing this to my attention. The html > template I was using is one that I have had for awhile, and > haven't been keeping it up to date as web standards have > changed. Anyhow, I have recoded it based on today's web > standards and it now passes validation. > > Aside from the template, the actual content of each page is > generated via a WYSIWYG plugin (xinha) within the CMS > which outputs the HTML. This allows him to update his own > content. For that reason, some of the html (eg. excessive > use of ) is beyond my control." Yes, the same lame excuse for utter incompetence all over again. In fact, Web standards have not changed for the most part since 10 years, but some people must have been hibernating the last 12 years or so. Some are still mentally asleep. > ..and, sure enough, there are now no HTML errors. Nor any CSS errors :) > I downloaded the source of my neighbour's page, stripped > out the xhtml and 'transitional' and inserted 'strict' > (as it is in my genealogy webpage at > http://www3.bell.net/alanji/illeman.htm). That is Valid HTML and CSS, but you should also check the semantics of your markup, so that it is accessible; in particular, you have DIV elements where you should have Hx elements, PRE elements where you should have DIV and P elements. And you should provide a semantical variant of the genealogy trees; consider using lists and/or SVG. As a first step, use the Show Outline feature of the W3C Validator to see if that reflects the logical structure of your document. > But when I tried to validate the HTML using.. > http://validator.w3.org/#validate-by-upload > ..many errors were present (many silly errors too, imo). > > So, does "transitional" and/or "xhtml" hide the errors that > 'strict' and 'html4' alone would find? No. Declaring a Transitional variant as opposed to a Strict variant of an (X)HTML document type does not hide errors as syntactic constructs that are errors in Strict do not need to be errors in Transitional. Declaring Strict, however, reveals many (but not all) presentational attributes, and some elements, for which other elements or CSS should have been used instead and which are therefore deprecated (see the columns captioned "Depr."): <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/elements.html> <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/index/attributes.html> Declaring XHTML instead of HTML rather reveals potential errors than hides them because XHTML must conform to the well-formedness principle of XML which HTML does not need to; that said, something that is an error in XHTML does not need to be an error in HTML for the exact same reason. There are, however, also a few instances where declaring XHTML instead of HTML can hide errors if the markup is parsed by a tag-soup parser instead (thanks to declaring it text/html for unsupporting UAs); most notably, unescaped ETAGO delimiters in commented `script' element content, which is ignored by an X(HT)ML parser (and the Validator then) but not by a tag-soup parser due to different content models (PCDATA and CDATA). This goes so far that some exceptionally clueless people actually recommend commenting out the element content in order to "hide the script" from a "buggy" W3C Validator instead of fixing the delimiter problem. HTH F'up2 ciwa.html PointedEars -- var bugRiddenCrashPronePieceOfJunk = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf('MSIE 5') != -1 && navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Mac') != -1 ) // Plone, register_function.js:16
From: Alan Illeman on 17 Jun 2010 17:25 Andy Dingley wrote: > On 17 June, 01:52, "Alan Illeman" <no...(a)nowhere.ca> wrote: > >> So, does "transitional" and/or "xhtml" hide the errors that >> 'strict' and 'html4' alone would find? > > Sort of, although "hide" is wrong. > > This site _is_ XHTML Transitional, so validating it as if it were > something else is an obvious error. There's XML syntax around empty > elements and there are even <font> tags in there. Both of these are > errors under HTML Strict. > > The markup is poor and both XHTML or Transitional are bad ideas, but > that doesn't make them definitively "wrong". Thanks for your advice, Andy. You too, Thomas. Where's Eric Meyer when you need him :-)
From: Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn on 17 Jun 2010 18:04 Andy Dingley wrote: > "Alan Illeman" wrote: >> So, does "transitional" and/or "xhtml" hide the errors that >> 'strict' and 'html4' alone would find? > Sort of, although "hide" is wrong. > > This site _is_ XHTML Transitional, so validating it as if it were > something else is an obvious error. There's XML syntax around empty > elements and there are even <font> tags in there. Both of these are > errors under HTML Strict. Not quite. <.../> is a syntax error in HTML, Strict or not, if it occurs in a context where text content is not allowed, for example in the HEAD element (as in <meta ... />). Because syntactically <.../> means the same as <...>> in HTML, thanks to the SGML SHORTTAG feature being enabled for HTML (4.01) per its declaration: <http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/sgmldecl.html> It is not an error, but merely unwise to use <.../> in other HTML contexts, the Strict variant being declared or not, since an HTML user agent may implement the SHORTTAG feature (and do so to a varying degree) or it may not. So there may be a `>' character displayed after the element or not. You don't want this to happen to you. (Although there appear to be few of them, there are UAs that support some aspects of SHORTTAG syntax; [de] <http://www.dodabo.de/html+css/tests/shorttag.html> discusses this. Incidentally, this also questions whether serving "HTML-compatible" XHTML as text/html is an idea that has been thought through by the authors of XHTML 1.0, since the Content-Type header appears to direct the choice of the parser already. Therefore, I recommend to avoid serving XHTML like that, and I have been informed that "XHTML Media Types" is going to emphasize this issue per my recommendation.) > The markup is poor and both XHTML or Transitional are bad ideas, but > that doesn't make them definitively "wrong". ACK PointedEars -- Danny Goodman's books are out of date and teach practices that are positively harmful for cross-browser scripting. -- Richard Cornford, cljs, <cife6q$253$1$8300dec7(a)news.demon.co.uk> (2004)
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