RE: Why Doesn't IE5 use the DTD to Validate?

Subject: RE: Why Doesn't IE5 use the DTD to Validate?
From: "John Dreystadt" <jdreysta@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 1999 11:36:24 -0500
I want to second the spirit of Paul's suggestion but not the letter. I
think that sometimes the person running the browser will know if they
want validation (Reader) and sometimes the Author will know. I think
the browsers should expose a setting by which the Reader can force
full validation. This would only show up in the Advanced panel but
would be useful during development of new pages, testing and so on.

I also believe that a PI that forces validation is useful for
e-commerce situations.

Last but not least, I think that the default should be no validation.
I realize that some people are going to have a problem with that
position but hear me out. On the World Wide Web, many more pages are
rendered just for viewing or for some minor scripting than are used
for true e-commerce or for other situations where validation is
important. So why should the parser spend time doing validation
checks? A parser is much faster checking only the well-formed rules
than full validation.

So I would switch Paul's suggestion to use the positive case:
<?xml:checkvalidity="yes"?>
or something similar.

By defaulting to no validation, we keep the parsing and rendering of
content as lightweight as possible much of the time. Allowing either
the Reader (using the browser) or the Author (using the PI) to request
validation makes it easy to achieve validation when needed. And I am
only suggesting that the default for browsers be no validation. I
think that every developer creating a new XML application is going to
have to consider the implications of validation and make a case by
case decision about the importance of validation.

John Dreystadt

>
> I propose a processing instruction that says that a
> document has a DTD but
> is not meant to be valid.
>
> <?xml:not-valid?>
>
> Then validating applications would treat it as if it were just
> well-formed.
>
> --
>  Paul Prescod  - ISOGEN Consulting Engineer speaking for
> only himself
>  http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco
>


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