🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Dr John Stockton wrote:

> >Your <form> with no action also upsets a genuine HTML validator.
> >As well as the #rrggbb value which is lacking quotes.  But you could
> >easily have determined that for yourself.
>
> Given that my <form> are needed (in AIUI at least one browser), and that
> no action is actually required, what do you suggest for an empty action?

When you say "no action is actually required" I presume this means
"the form isn't supposed to work when javascript is disabled".
Speaking in general terms I'd have to counsel against that approach,
but it's your web page after all.  I came in this thread late, and
only in order to comment on the HTML validation details.  If you've
decided this is what you want, then you'll presumably disregard the
validation error;  but browsers typically behave as if the default
action URL were the current URL, so you could conceivably insert that
to pacify the validator (I mean it wouldn't make the form any more or
less useful than it was before).  Some people just insert ACTION="#"

> I use TIDY, from W3, as a local validator;

You're probably going to find this more pedantic than you wanted, but
let's try to distinguish between a "validator" (a term which in an
SGML context has a very precise meaning), and other kinds of checker.
There's a longer version of this answer at
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/validate.html

I see that it's in need of some updating - but on the substantive
issue we're dealing with here, I stand by what it says.

> it did not complain about unquoted #00FFFF,

which proves that it could not be a validator.  There is no official
version of HTML in which that character string would not need quotes
around it when it appears as an attribute value in HTML.[1]

That's no criticism of TIDY: it makes no claim to be a validator;
it's a useful tool in its own terms.

The question of whether a particular syntax is "valid" (n the SGML
sense) in a particular version of HTML is a purely factual issue, with
a precise yes/no answer that a validator can unambiguously report to
you.  The question of whether that validation report matters to you is
quite a different question.  It's best to keep the two issues apart.


[1]Validators of course can't properly parse an HTML document that's
meant to be partly generated at run-time from Javascript, so there are
bound to be additional anomalies if you're doing that.