Re: [Invalid] Markup Validation of index.html - W3C Markup Validator_files

Daniel James <[email protected]> Wed, 18 Dec 2013 19:55:14 +0000
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lib.boost.documentation
Message-ID <CAHOE3yeh4A0WhtQSYPp3RCzzkpGbzAjdVXNkFYvE3-R8zm5JnA@mail.gmail.com>
On 18 December 2013 19:20, Paul A. Bristow <[email protected]> wrote:
> I've been checking the output from a documentation produced using Quickbook
>
> (after getting a clean bill of health from Boost inspect tool and Doxygen warnings-free)

It's a bit hard to comment without knowing what file these are for.
But generally speaking validation is mainly useful for hand generated
files, and even then it's not nearly as useful a check as many
believe. I don't see generating valid html as an important goal.

> There are complaints about the header L
>
> 1.      Warning No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.

There should be a tag in the generated html that looks like:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII">

And even if it isn't understood, the generated text should be all
ASCII so the default encoding should always be fine. The reason I did
it that way is because the encoding specified in the file can be
overridden by http parameters, and I don't always have control over
how the files are served, so I used the safest option.

> 2.      Warning Unable to Determine Parse Mode!

This really doesn't matter, browsers always use a HTML parser unless
the http mime type tells them otherwise.

> 3.      Warning No DOCTYPE found! Checking with default HTML 4.01 Transitional Document Type.

The boostbook css was written for quirks mode. adding a doctype would
cause browsers to use standards mode which makes some things look
wrong (such as tables). It would be nice to fix this, but it's not a
priority.

> 4.      Info No Character encoding declared at document level
> 1.      Error Line 11, Column 1: no document type declaration; implying "<!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM>"

Already gone over these.

> 2.      Error Line 14, Column 7: end tag for "HEAD" which is not finished

This one is odd. Do you have a title tag? Or maybe it just doesn't
understand that some tags are self closing.