[pmwiki-users] Skin authors : Many PmWiki skins fail to validate

[Petko Yotov]

On Tuesday 07 April 2009 04:04:04 DaveG wrote:
> Petko Yotov wrote:
> > On Tuesday 07 April 2009 01:36:29 DaveG wrote:
> >>  > Petko Yotov schrieb:
> >>  > I was surprised to
> >>  > find out that in the first 20 skins, 17 failed to validate.
> >>
> >> The w3 validation doesn't validate skins. It validates HTML pages. The
> >> validation results can provide useful direction to both the skin author
> >> *and* the specific page that is being validated.
> >
> > If a page with the same content, but with the default PmWiki skin,
> > validates, one could legitimately consider that what does not validate is
> > the skin.
>
> This is simply not accurate. It is possible for a page to use
> html/attributes which are valid with one skin and invalid with another.
> This does not mean that the skin is somehow invalid.

In that case (same page validates with another skin) the skin uses a wrong 
DOCTYPE. And could be fixed by using another DOCTYPE. What are the benefits 
of advertizing that your skin is "XHTML Strict" if the page XHTML is not 
strictly correct?


> > I'll be happy to help authors fix their recipes if they are unable or
> > unwilling to do it, or disable on pmwiki.org those demos that fail to
> > validate.
>
> With respect to skins, I think this is a rather ridiculous statement,
> given that it is possible for the content of a web page to cause page to
> be invalid for a given skin.

If another skin, e.g. the default one, produces valid HTML with the same page, 
then it is possible and the "given" skin should be fixed.

Petko