Archive for February, 2006

A certain site checking service (who have managed to bamboozle a large number of public sector bodies into paying attention to their ‘league tables’) complains about Very True Things because it claims that –

Tag 'del' may not come under tags 'p' or 'div'
Tag 'ins' may not come under tags 'p' or 'div'

What’s more it claims that these problems make the page invalid and that its validity checks are carried out in accordance with the HTML 4.01 specification.

Very True Things is XHTML 1.0 not HTML 4.01. What’s more it did at the time of the test contain a deprecated attribute which whilst picked up by said checker was not listed as a validation fail, despite the fact that I use a Strict doctype. Any system that claims to report on validity should at least check the doctype and apply the appropriate rules.

More importantly, ins and del are very odd elements.
As the XHTML DTD says:

<!-- these can occur at block or inline level -->
<!ENTITY % misc.inline "ins | del | script">

The HTML DTD is a little more difficult to read as it relies on an SGMLism not much used in HTML:

<!ELEMENT BODY O O (%block;|SCRIPT)+ +(INS|DEL) -- document body -->

But in either case the validator will confirm that ins and del can appear just about anywhere in the document, and can certainly be used within a p and div elements.

So next time your client or boss gets hassled by a salesman from this company (fvgr zbefr) you can tell that they don’t know what they’re talking about and should be ignored.