Re: HTML checker and specification

"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 94 13:19:17 EDT
Message-id: <9407131718.AA17324@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@oclc.org>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-ig@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: HTML checker and specification 
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[Sorry for the wide audience, but I think lots of folks will want
to try this out...]

A local web-master and I just put together a prototype of an HTML
validation service. I don't know why I didn't do this long ago...

It's a form: you enter the HTML that you're not sure about, and
press "Submit." The server runs sgmls and shows you the output.

The output is a little obscure. We hope to alleviate that in the
future, but you can try it out now... Oops! It seems that the
machine running the HTTP server with the validate-html CGI script
is "inside the firewall."

Crud. Well, if somebody's got a server that they can run perl CGI
scripts on, we could try to get together and make this available
to the internet at large.

Dan

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In message <9407131457.AA03214@www3.cern.ch>, Tim Berners-Lee writes:
>
>
>Dan Connolly has put a lot of effort into HTML checkers,
>and is the editor of the HTML level 2 spec.
>
>Check pointers from 
>
>http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/markUp/MarkUp.html
>
>for deatils of Dan's work and his collection of reference material.
>HTML is defined syntactically by the HTML document type definition
>and the SGML standard.  One could generate definitions in
>other languages -- but most of the work would be in representing
>the SGML angles.  (Might be interesting!)
>
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>Date: Wed, 13 Jul 94 15:34:18 +0200
>From: cdodge@awi-bremerhaven.de
>To: timbl@www0.cern.ch
>Subject: HTML checker and specification
>Content-Type: text
>Content-Length: 1878
>
>Hi Tim,
>
>As a result of my confusion over what constitutes "legal" HTML, I
>have started doing a bit of work on a HTML checker (working as a CGI
>script) - that is a program that checks the HTML, and *not* the links
>(the job of html-analyzer). I don't think that I'm the only one who
>has had problems putting together "legal" HTML, for example the NCSA
>Mosaic home page does not use the <HEAD> and <BODY> elements. 
>
>
>As an academic exercise, this has been so far useful, however I would
>like to spend my time and energy in "Web constructive" ways, so I
>don't want to reproduce the work someone else has done. I have looked
>around, but can't find any program that does this, maybe you know of
>something?

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