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Overview Description: According to http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/REC-xhtml1-20020801/#prohibitions a form tag cannot be a descendant of another form tag However, a nested form validates correctly. Steps to Reproduce: Validate this test case: ==================== <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>TITLE</title> </head> <body> <form id="f1" action="/action0"> <div><form id="f2" action="/action1"><div>hello 1</div></form></div> </form> </body> </html> ================== Actual Results: Passed validation Expected Results: Failed validation, 1 error Build & Date Markup Validation Service v0.7.2 on 2006-07-12
The nesting scenario you describe is indeed non conformant (as explained in http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#prohibitions ) but if you look at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.9 in the XHTML specification, you will see an explanation of why constraints regarding *any* nesting depth cannot be expressed in the formal grammar (DTD) used by XHTML 1.0, and therefore it can not be (in)validated. I am setting this issue as "Later", knowing that this is the job for a conformance checker, not a mere validator.