Suggestion: encoding and doctype tips to the users of validator

Dear list,

First of all, I find the validator service very useful, and
recommend it to all HTML users.

I am not a member of the list, but would like to come with a
suggestion to make the validator even more useful to novice
users (like me).


The use of Document Type and Character Encoding
***********************************************

When a user has chosen "Encoding" and "Doctype" on the
validator page, it would be very useful if the validator
could make a suggestion regarding the use of tags.

For instance when choosing "iso-8859-1 (Western Europe)" for
Encoding and "HTML 2.0" for Doctype, the Validator currently
gives the following information:

 >DOCTYPE Override in effect! Any DOCTYPE Declaration in the document
 >has been suppressed and the DOCTYPE for «HTML 2.0» inserted instead.
 >The document will not be Valid until you alter the source file to
 >reflect this new DOCTYPE.

If, in addition, something like the following could be
suggested to the user, I think it would help beginners a lot:

  You can specify that this page uses the DOCTYPE "HTML 2.0"
  by inserting:
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
  as the first line of the document.
  You can specify that the character encoding is "iso-8859-1"
  by inserting:
  <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
  within the <head> tag of the document.

I hope it is possible to make this information available in
standard mode (if that is not possible, perhaps it culd be
available in verbose mode).


-- 
Håvard Tveite                       Phone:  +47 64948857
Department of Mapping Sciences      Fax:    +47 64948856
Agricultural University of Norway  http://www.nlh.no/ikf
Hogskoleveien 14, POBox 5034, N-1432 Ås, NORWAY

Received on Monday, 11 August 2003 05:22:08 UTC