L.D.
I am not going to say whether the validator is right or wrong, and it may be
both, but relate my experiences in writing FORTRAN and AutoLisp programs.
In writing either code, if you forget an opening or closing parenthesis (and
in AutoLisp there are plenty) you can get a whole list of errors because the
program doesn't know what your intent was, i.e., did you intend for a
parenthesis to be here? If so, then the rest of the reported errors are
incorrect; if not, then maybe the error is the next reported error; or the
following reported error, etc.
I ran a site thru the validator.w3.org validator and it gave a whole bunch of
errors because the closing, /A> was missing on one line and another line had
an opening, <A, and nesting wasn't permitted. Therefore, if the error in the
first line was corrected, the other errors related to it would not appear.
Debugging a program such as AutoLisp or HTML where opening and closing
parentheses/tags/etc. are required for each instruction is quite frustrating,
particularly when you can have nested instructions. I have found that
indenting is extremely helpful in understanding and debugging nested commands.
When I was going to college (after I got out of the Navy), I took the
approach on homework that the problems *couldn't* be hard as it was an
undergraduate course. When I found myself spending more than 30 minutes on a
problem, I would stop work, get a cup of coffee, and after drinking the
coffee, I would throw away all the work that I previously did on the problem
and start over again. Invariably, the correct solution would come on the
first try as I had removed that incorrect trail from my mind that I had
convinced myself was correct. (You *knew* what you were doing was correct
and, by gum, every time you looked at it, you saw a correct approach.)
Perhaps, in the example you gave, did you have the closing, "/head>" in a
nested procedure?
Roger Turk
Tucson, Arizona USA
L.D. wrote:
>>I tried validator.w3.org and found it worthless.
Why? Because it is claiming things are wrong when they're not. It
claimed the META lacked ends, but the ">" is on every one of them,
although one line is over 400 characters ... It claimed that the
</head> didn't belong because there wasn't <head> etc etc etc
Could someone else provide a URL to an html validator that can see
beginnings and ends of tags, please? When I have to wade through stuff
that isn't wrong in an attempt to find what *might* be wrong, I can't
get anything done. :(<<
