March 23, 2004
Annoying discovery of the day: The W3C validator doesn't pick up missing character entity end delimiters (;) for HTML. Since I've always validated against the HTML standard (specifically, HTML 4.01 Strict), I've always been blissfully ignorant of this, but as I'm converting all my documents to XHTML (because of MathML) I'm haunted by "reference not terminated by REFC delimiter" errors. Now, the validator doesn't do anything wrong with not picking these errors up, as REFC delimiters are optional in SGML but required in XML (and it does pick them up when validating against any version/flavor of XHTML). These errors are my own, but I'm a little annoyed about how lenient SGML is...