Posted by Andy Dingley on 10/18/06 16:53

Albert Wiersch wrote:

> Call it a primitive tool if you want. It doesn't matter. A hammer is still a
> "primitive" tool but still quite useful.

You can drive screws in by hitting them, but that doesn't make a hammer
into a screwdriver.

You're selling a "HTML lint" and calling a validator. "Validator" has
a meaning, and yours isn't it. Yes, you can use your tool to improve
web sites, and even to help them become valid. It doesn't do it by
validating them.


> "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote in message

> > Besides, there's really no such thing as "HTML validator". It's
> > an SGML validator, or XML validator, or both, and if you use it for HTML
> > documents, that's your decision.

> Have you notified the W3C that there's no such thing as an "HTML Validator"?

I presume Jukka's point is that validation is fundamentally defined by
the SGML protocol (or XML) and isn't a specific feature of HTML.
Validators are thus "SGML validators" not "HTML validators". Of course
there can be a HTML validator - it's just an SGML validator that only
works for the HTML doctypes. It's a subset of the same SGML
functionality though, not anything new or specific to HTML.

A HTML validator that is _not_ an SGML validator is not a HTML
validator, it's only an approximation. It might even only be a partial
SGML validator (plenty of SGML features are not required for HTML) and
it could be a HTML validator, but it still needs to follow the basic
algorithms of SGML validation and to base its validation "process" on
the rules expressed by the DTD, not by the developer's own ideas of
"what's important".

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