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Bug 5000 - validator parses textarea contents but should not
Summary: validator parses textarea contents but should not
Status: RESOLVED INVALID
Alias: None
Product: Validator
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Parser (show other bugs)
Version: 0.8.1
Hardware: PC Windows XP
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: This bug has no owner yet - up for the taking
QA Contact: qa-dev tracking
URL: http://don.netfam.us/2007-09-01/edit....
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2007-09-02 09:04 UTC by Don Colton
Modified: 2007-09-02 23:20 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:

Attachments

Description Don Colton 2007-09-02 09:04:54 UTC 
I love having the validator.  Thanks for a great tool.

My understanding is that almost anything between a <textarea> and </textarea> tag is merely displayed on the web page, and is not parsed in any way.

I have a textarea that is pre-filled with html, including doctype, table, and other elements.  These cause the W3 validator to choke and emit lots of error messages when most of them are not any errors.

I acknowledge that I am not an expert.  I did confer with a couple of other programmers who do HTML from time to time, and we think this may be an actual validator bug.  (Nothing turned up when I searched the bug list for "pre-filled textarea".)

Thanks!  Don
Comment 1 Olivier Thereaux 2007-09-02 23:20:04 UTC 
textarea element does not "accept" anything. It is defined as accepting CDATA, in other words, plain text only. If you want html stuff in there, you'll have to escape it.

See also:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-validator/2007Aug/thread.html#msg143