New subject: gutvol-d Digest, Vol 13, Issue 24

24 Aug 2005

      David A. Desrosiers" <hacker@gnu-designs.com> wrote:
...
...
I've learned the fear the <div> container.  Let me show you why using 
a <div> container for "non-specific" blocks of text won't work.
...
<div>
<head>Level 1</head>
<p>Paragraph 1.</p>
 <div>Block o' text.</div>
<p> Paragraph 2.</p>
</div>
Improperly nested tags will never validate. You can't have a bare 
string inside the <head> tag like that, and <head> isn't a child of 
<div>, so that won't work either. After correcting those errors, it 
validates fine.
...
The above will not validate.  Once you go one deeper in a nest, you 
cannot come back up just one level.  You have to close the whole 
nesting.
Nope, this is completely untrue.
...
The above would work if changed to:
<div>
<head>Level 1</head>
<p>Paragraph 1.</p>
 <div>Block o' text.</div>
</div>
<div>
<p> Paragraph 2.</p>
</div>
You're still producing invalid markup. Try something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head><title>Level 1</title></head>
   <body>
      <p>Level 1</p>
      <div>
         <p>Paragraph 1.</p>
         <div>Block o' text.</div>
         <p> Paragraph 2.</p>
      </div>
   </body>
</html>
I fear that Mr. Desrosiers has made the classic error of confusing 
varieties of fruits, which is third only to "never become involved in a 
land war in Asia." and "never bet with a Sicilian when death is on the 
line." Mr. Hutchinson's code snippet was encoded using the TEI 
vocabulary of XML, not the XHTML vocabulary. In TEI the <head> tag is 
analogous to the HTML <h1> tag, and the HTML <head> tag is analogous to 
the TEI <teiHeader> tag. Apples and oranges.

On the other hand, I don't see how Mr. Hutchinson's second example could 
validate if the first does not, particularly given the fact that DTD's 
are not structured in such a way to permit a validator to make that kind 
of a judgment ("if a <div> contains a <div> it must be the last element 
of the first <div>" or "if a <div> contains a <div> it may be preceded 
by a <p>, but not followed by one"). I'm not that great at deciphering 
DTDs, but I don't see anything in http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/DS.html which 
would cause me to believe that example 1 is not valid.

In this particular case, I suspect a bug in the validator program. I 
mean, writing validators is hard, and I am aware of at least one bug in 
the W3C's online HTML validator.

Supposedly, Xerces is a validating parser. Maybe I'll see if I can find 
the time to run the snippet through Xerces and see if (and where) it breaks.

Re: gutvol-d Digest, Vol 13, Issue 24

Lee Passey

Marcello Perathoner

tags

participants (2)