[whatwg] text/html flavor conformance checkers and <foo />

[Henri Sivonen]

On Apr 26, 2005, at 19:16, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> Henri Sivonen wrote:
>> What do you suggest the parser layer of an text/html conformance 
>> checker say about
>> <input checkbox ...>?
>> 1. Silently treat as <input type="checkbox" ...>?
>> 2. Treat as <input type="checkbox" ...> but warn?
>> 3. Treat as <input checkbox="checkbox" ...> causing an error to be    
>> reported on a higher layer?
>> 4. Treat as fatal error in the parser?
>
> A combination of 3 and 4. As |checkbox="checkbox"| is not a valid 
> attribute and not a valid attribute value of the invalid attribute as 
> far as I know.

If you pick 4, you never get to the higher layer.

> Or did you mean something else by 4? (It might be that we just 
> agree...)

I meant that in case 4 the error would be reported in the component 
that has responsibilities similar to the responsibilities of the XML 
processor in the XHTML case. Since an XML processor would not flag 
<input checkbox="checkbox"/> as an error, I think requiring the HTML 
parser to know about particular attributes would be bad design.

My vision of a conformance checker looks like this:
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/img/what-wg-conformance-checker.png

I think the requirements for conformance checkers should be formulated 
in such a way that the box labeled "Tag-level HTML parser" would not 
need to know about any particular element or attribute names.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/