Re: multi browser forms issue

From	"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
Newsgroups	comp.lang.javascript
Subject	Re: multi browser forms issue
Date	2011-11-07 16:08 +0200
Organization	A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID	<j98onv$lpt$1@dont-email.me> (permalink)
References	<a9622d31-d06a-4886-8a6d-b90e8a1781ef@o19g2000vbk.googlegroups.com> <6b248eda-8b2d-4618-af26-d3983cdcdbb1@u10g2000prl.googlegroups.com> <m2y5vsnl21.fsf@nntp.bednarz.nl>

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11/7/2011 3:01 PM, Eric Bednarz wrote:

>>> <!DOCTYPE HTML>
>>
>> Why are you using HTML5?
>
> That’s not ‘using HTML5’,

It depends on what you mean by ‘using HTML5’. It’s a vague expression, 
and not just because ‘HTML5’ is vague.

> that’s choosing a rendering mode in a mnemonic
> fashion, and without the cargo cult parts that do nothing.

It also has the effect of putting some HTML linters to a mode where they 
perform a mixture of checks based on some understanding of some version 
of HTML5, as opposite to performing markup validation that reports 
reportable markup errors (an SGML concept that you surely know but most 
participants don’t; the resident troll is either very ignorant or 
pretends to be very ignorant, as usual).

While HTML5 linters, misleadingly called ‘validators’ in HTML5 drafts 
are all experimental and with loads of bugs and without a reasonable 
description of what they actually do, they are often more useful than 
markup validators. Markup validation was never meant to be anything more 
than a formal check of markup for syntactic correctness and conformance 
to a DTD – though it has often been advertised as an overall quality check.

The JavaScript aspect here is that – contrary to many people’s 
misconceptions – markup validators do not perform any kind of check of 
JavaScript code. It’s just character data to them, parsed by applicable 
parsing rules, paying attention only to certain formal issues that 
relate to the potentially markup-significant characters ‘&’ and ‘<’. But 
HTML linters may do all kinds of things.

An HTML linter might well check e.g. href attribute values, embedded CSS 
code, and JavaScript code. It might call a JavaScript linter and/or 
perform its own checks, which might relate to specific HTML constructs.

In practice, I don’t think the current HTML5 linters inspect JavaScript 
code much. But they have tried to do such things. There was an incident 
where an HTML5 linter gave strange error messages about event attributes 
containing return statements. I don’t know what the idea really was, but 
there are many _possibilities_ for doing something useful, though it 
would need to be right in order to be useful.

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

Thread

multi browser forms issue Dizzee <slightlyandy@gmail.com> - 2011-11-06 14:07 -0800
  Re: multi browser forms issue Denis McMahon <denismfmcmahon@gmail.com> - 2011-11-06 22:38 +0000
  Re: multi browser forms issue David Mark <dmark.cinsoft@gmail.com> - 2011-11-07 04:40 -0800
    Re: multi browser forms issue Eric Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-zur-hoelle.org> - 2011-11-07 14:01 +0100
      Re: multi browser forms issue Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-07 14:13 +0100
        Re: multi browser forms issue Eric Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-zur-hoelle.org> - 2011-11-07 14:58 +0100
          Re: multi browser forms issue Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-07 15:51 +0100
      Re: multi browser forms issue "Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> - 2011-11-07 16:08 +0200
      Re: multi browser forms issue David Mark <dmark.cinsoft@gmail.com> - 2011-11-07 13:05 -0800
        Re: multi browser forms issue Eric Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-zur-hoelle.org> - 2011-11-07 23:07 +0100
          Re: multi browser forms issue Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-07 23:26 +0100
            Re: multi browser forms issue Eric Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-zur-hoelle.org> - 2011-11-09 20:17 +0100
              Re: multi browser forms issue Thomas 'PointedEars' Lahn <PointedEars@web.de> - 2011-11-10 18:42 +0100
                Re: multi browser forms issue Eric Bednarz <bednarz@fahr-zur-hoelle.org> - 2011-11-11 23:38 +0100

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