Re: Quality checking of code

[Ted Dennison<dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <5ee5b646.0110021024.74e392ef@posting.google.com>, Robert Dewar
says...
>Of course, as I understand it, there was no syntax error
>in our page, just a poor choice of colors (white on white)
>that for some reason was mishandled (in a user friendly
>manner) by both IE (all versions) and older versions of
>Netscape :-)

That's correct, as far as the original problem was concerned. However, it would
not be perfectly true to say that "there was no syntax error on that page". In
fact, there were and still are several. For one thing, there is no <!DOCTYPE>
tag, as required by the standard. That's a fatal error for the W3C validator,
and it can check no further. If I tell it to assume HTML 3.2 and ignore the
(bad) header, it pulls 10 syntax errors.

At least one of those errors is quite visible to Mozilla. The entire contents of
the main frame were put into a hyperlink with the rather amusing target of
"(Empty Reference!)". Due to this error, any attempt to click *anywhere* within
that frame with my Mozilla browser nets me a page transition to:

Not Found
The requested URL /texts/news/product_updates/(Empty Reference!) was not found
on this server.

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