I noticed something the other day, which I thought I share with
everyone. I was validating a site I had made with the W3C HTML
Validator, and found that it can only validate "publicly accessible"
HTML.

By this I mean if you have a member only area which uses something
like Sessions for authentication, then the HTML validator cannot get
in! Which I guess when you think about it is not too surprising.

So when you go to validate your member only pages, the HTML validator
may say theyre fine but infact the only page it will ever validate is
the "No Access" page.

Chances are if you have member only pages they will be dynamically
generated so validating by file upload is no good. What I did was
remove temporarily any major areas of functionality then disable the
login scripts, so the HTML validator could get in.

Maybe this is not a new thing, but I did a quick search and didnt find
anything previously posted about it.

It seems "David" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:[color=blue]
>So when you go to validate your member only pages, the HTML validator
>may say theyre fine but infact the only page it will ever validate is
>the "No Access" page.[/color]

Right -- this is one of the reasons for always choosing the "view
source" or "view outline" option.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

It seems "David" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:[color=blue]
>Chances are if you have member only pages they will be dynamically
>generated so validating by file upload is no good. What I did was
>remove temporarily any major areas of functionality then disable the
>login scripts, so the HTML validator could get in.[/color]

Or you can access the real pages yourself, do "View Source" in your
browser (usually Ctrl-U on Windows browsers), copy all the source,
and paste it to the validator window.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
2.1 changes: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/changes.html
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

In article <3eb239cb.0402210900.7a910f67@posting.google.com >,
biffta@hotmail.com (David) writes:
[color=blue]
> By this I mean if you have a member only area which uses something
> like Sessions for authentication, then the HTML validator cannot get
> in![/color]

Why not? What can't it do?

It can do HTTP Basic Authentication. To do sessions in URLs just requires
you to type a URL in.

If you do want to send more detail, for example to define a cookie
or to validate a content-negotiated page, the Advanced form at
Page Valet ( http://valet.webthing.com/page/ ) lets you do that.

Bottom line: please tell us what you want to do but can't.

--
Nick Kew

Stan Brown <the_stan_brown@fastmail.fm> wrote in message news:<MPG.1aa17ccec4c725f098be9e@news.odyssey.net> ...[color=blue]
> It seems "David" wrote in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:[color=green]
> >Chances are if you have member only pages they will be dynamically
> >generated so validating by file upload is no good. What I did was
> >remove temporarily any major areas of functionality then disable the
> >login scripts, so the HTML validator could get in.[/color]
>
> Or you can access the real pages yourself, do "View Source" in your
> browser (usually Ctrl-U on Windows browsers), copy all the source,
> and paste it to the validator window.[/color]

yeh i sure like to copy and paste 40+ pages!

David wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> Or you can access the real pages yourself, do "View Source" in your
>> browser (usually Ctrl-U on Windows browsers), copy all the source,
>> and paste it to the validator window.[/color]
>
> yeh i sure like to copy and paste 40+ pages![/color]

Well you did write them, didn't you ? Best time to validate a page is
exactly when you write it ... :)

--
Thank you
Timothy Madden
---------------------------
And I don't wanna miss a thing

> If you do want to send more detail, for example to define a cookie[color=blue]
> or to validate a content-negotiated page, the Advanced form at
> Page Valet ( http://valet.webthing.com/page/ ) lets you do that.[/color]

Well sod it if I have to pay £80 a year for the privilidge. Besides I
wasnt overly impressed with the standard validation that site offers
as all of my pages failed! Which surprised me considering the W3C's
validator passed them?

# E: Line 237, char 27, omitted tag minimization parameter can be
omitted only if OMITTAG NO is specified in the SGML declaration .
# E: Line 253, char 49, omitted tag minimization parameter can be
omitted only if OMITTAG NO is specified in the SGML declaration .
# E: Line 265, char 25, omitted tag minimization parameter can be
omitted only if OMITTAG NO is specified in the SGML declaration .
# E: Line 273, char 15, omitted tag minimization parameter can be
omitted only if OMITTAG NO is specified in the SGML declaration .
# E: Line 280, char 15, omitted tag minimization parameter can be
omitted only if OMITTAG NO is specified in the SGML declaration .
# E: Line 304, char 15, omitted tag minimization parameter can be
omitted only if OMITTAG NO is specified in the SGML declaration .
# E: Line 317, char 25, omitted tag minimization parameter can be
omitted only if OMITTAG NO is specified in the SGML declaration .

....and so on!

In article <3eb239cb.0402220543.67c3d521@posting.google.com >,
biffta@hotmail.com (David) writes:
[color=blue]
> Well sod it if I have to pay £80 a year for the privilidge. Besides I[/color]

Your choice. Either you want more than the free services offer,
or you don't. And since you haven't answered my question about how
the W3C validator fails to meet your needs, there's nothing in your
posts I can interpret as a feature request for it.
[color=blue]
> wasnt overly impressed with the standard validation that site offers
> as all of my pages failed! Which surprised me considering the W3C's
> validator passed them?[/color]

If that's trying to be a bug report, it would need to be supported
by a URL illustrating the behaviour.

But anyway, I can tell you what's happening without a URL. You've
selected a Parse Mode that's stricter than minimal SGML compliance.
If you had selected SGML parse mode you'd have got the same results
as with the W3C validator.

Note that with SGML parse mode, you'll get some surprising passes.
For example, this is valid (go ahead and validate it):
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">
<title/HTML example/
<p<p/This is the second paragraph in this document.
The first was empty.

But abbreviated SGML forms such as this will tend to choke many of the
parsers commonly used for HTML. That's why validating to a stricter
parse mode is useful, and why Page Valet and the WDG Validator offer
you options to do so.

--
Nick Kew