[whatwg] Re: Doctype FPI

[Tim Bray]

On Jul 14, 2004, at 1:24 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:

> Yes. People rely on DTDs in a way which has led to millions of authors 
> to
> have a false sense of having done the right thing, when in fact their
> documents are sometimes worse than documents that are syntactically
> slightly broken but semantically fine.

Agreed, but as a Web Designer who is almost never smart enough to get a 
page design right first time, and who thus spends time crawling down 
CSS rat-holes, I have to say that the online HTML and CSS validators 
are incredibly useful at helping me find my more obvious bugs, and thus 
are huge time-savers.  Nobody claims that having validated successfully 
really proves anything of much use, but precise indications of how & 
where you're *not* valid are incredibly useful.

Thus I think the work of the WHAT-WG would be substantially more useful 
to the community if it were accompanied by some sort of validator that 
would help people like me deal with the consequences of our own 
stupidity.

I agree with someone else who suggested that Relax-NG/Schematron would 
be the sensible way to go about constructing such a thing.  I would 
further point out that the RelaxNG community is full of people in 
evangelism mode who might be inclined to pitch in and help if asked.

- Tim Bray, Director of Web Technologies, Sun Microsystems
   +1-877-305-0889 http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
   AIM: MarkupPedant
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