Re: Message about "face" in HTML 3.2 document

David Dorward wrote:

> On 28 Aug 2009, at 13:45, sylvain.lavalley@d2l-informatique.com wrote:
>>
>> This message isn't really useful and seems to say that "FACE" is
>> incorrect and that "face"
>>  is correct. It doesn't indicate that "face" is forbidden.
>
> The error message is badly worded and is trying to give help with a
> particular use case that some people new to XHTML encounter. When that
> isn't the problem,

And mostly it isn't.

> it is simply confusing.

I'm not sure about that "simply" part. I'd rather say "thoroughly and 
absurdly".

>  I believe it has been made
> smarter in the current development version
> <http://qa-dev.w3.org/wmvs/HEAD/

It does not need to be made smarter. It needs to be removed as a grossly 
failed attempt at being useful.

Here's what the development version says if I throw foo="bar" into a <form> 
tag:

Attribute "foo" is not a valid attribute. Did you mean "onkeydown" or 
"nohref"?

I could not have imagined that they invented something _that_ absurd in 
trying to make the misguided heuristics "smarter".

You haven't seen everything yet... suppose you try to use
<font face="Arial">Hello</font>
in a document purported to be XHTML 1.0 Strict. No, you just could not have 
guessed what the helpful heuristics says:

element "font" undefined. Did you mean "font" or "basefont"?

Oh, please. Just take the "feature" away. Errare humanum est - et confiteri 
errorem prudentis.

-- 
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Monday, 31 August 2009 17:28:20 UTC