Help! Links w/Lynx don't work

[JQ Johnson]

Thomas Dowling notes that running one's web pages through a validator
doesn't always catch problems with the code.  On the "line breaks in URLs"
issue, he writes:

>A strict validator would not have detected the problem, since URLs with
>white space apparently don't violate the DTD

I agree completely, which is one reason I generally urge caution in using
DTD-based validators when I teach web page debugging.  I prefer page
checkers such as WebLINT or RxHTML, or the ones built into most modern HTML
editors, that are more heuristic in picking the lint off web pages.

In the case of the "line breaks in URLs problem, the version of WebLINT I
tried didn't detect the error, but such errors would be a natural to add to
a revised version, since the WebLINT philosophy focuses on bad practice
rather than just violations of formal specs.  RxHTML, on the other hand,
very nicely reported failing to access the URL specified by the first text
up to the line break.

Moral:  formal specifications are nice (especially since we have so many to
choose from!), but if they don't match the reality of implementation they
aren't enough.

References:
WebLINT: <URL:http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/weblint>
RxHTML:  <URL:http://www2.imagiware.com/RxHTML/>

JQ Johnson                      Office: 115F Knight Library
Academic Education Coordinator  E-mail: jqj at darkwing.uoregon.edu
1299 University of Oregon       voice: 1-541-346-1746
Eugene, OR  97403-1299          fax: 1-541-346-3485