Stumped:: web HTML. Caution, may be OT.

Sat May 31 05:55:41 UTC 2008

At 2008-05-30T21:28:58-07:00, Gary Kline wrote:

> Any guesses why things like this blowup::
>
>   <!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en" >

The quoted string above is the so-called Formal Public Identifier
(FPI) of the DTD, i.e., the "standard", that your HTML page claims to
conform to.  However, the format of the FPI in your page is wrong.
For instance, "dtd" should be the upper case "DTD", and the ISO 639
language code "en" should be the upper case "EN".  In addition, the
entire FPI is case-sensitive, so "Transitional" is different from
"transitional".  The recommended FPI for W3C HTML 4.0 Transitional is
"-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN".  So, the above line should
read

  <!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" >

Better still, follow the normal practice of writing "doctype" and
"public" in upper case, and eliminating unnecessary whitespace, and
make it

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

At 2008-05-29T19:39:02-07:00, Gary Kline wrote:

> I still have unread messages down-queue, but may as well ask if
> there are any HTML/XML checkers in ports that would help validate my
> mark.

See my message earlier in this thread, where I mentioned
textproc/opensp, and how to use it.  In fact, the W3C validator is
based on OpenSP, see http://validator.w3.org/docs/help.html#how

Raghavendra.

-- 
N. Raghavendra <raghu at mri.ernet.in> | http://www.retrotexts.net/
Harish-Chandra Research Institute   | http://www.mri.ernet.in/
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