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The validator should perform attribute value parsing. More: http://daringfireball.net/2002/11/a_valid_point.html Example: http://daringfireball.net/misc/attribute_values.html
This has been cooking on my mental TODO list for some time. I very much agree; we should attempt to optionally parse attribute values for a subset of known DOCTYPEs. Depending on when XML Schema Validation lands, the easiest way to achieve it may be by way of a custom Schema for XML-based DOCTYPEs (unless the W3C retroactively publishes Schema for all existing document types). The alternative is to "reinvent" Schema (which we may have to do for the SGML types in any case) as a generic checker and configuration files listing possible data types and ranges for each attribute. And that is most definitely a task for after the Validator is modularized!