Web Devout tidings

The W3C Markup Validator is an excellent tool. If you’re a serious web developer, using the Validator is probably a routine by now. It’s also very reliable when it says you have an error. However, there are plenty of cases where the Validator will say a page is valid even though it doesn’t actually comply with the HTML or XHTML standard.

The Validator pretty much assesses two levels of compliance: it makes sure that your document is parseable using either an SGML parser (for HTML) or an XML parser (for XHTML), and then it checks your document’s compliance with the DTD specified by the doctype declaration.

However, the HTML and XHTML specifications demand additional restrictions that aren’t part of the DTD. For example, many values are specified as “number” values, even though in the DTD they are ultimately just CDATA, which can contain text. XHTML further limits the Validator due to the fact that XML DTDs aren’t as expressive as other DTDs and are unable to tell the Validator that, for example, form elements cannot be descendants of other form elements.

Here are a few test cases having fun with non-compliant but “valid” markup:

• HTML version
• XHTML version
• HTML div version
• XHTML div version