missing validation

[roedygr]

These two lines will not even raise an informational message:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-FieldType" content="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-FieldType" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">


they should read

<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">

[Albert Wiersch]

I'm not sure what to do here. Is this a "common" error (where did these come from)? How would CSE HTML Validator know that you wanted something else instead and that it isn't a "custom" http-equiv value? Perhaps there could be a list of commonly used http-equiv values and if it doesn't match one of those then some message is generated. Thoughts?

[MikeGale]

It would be useful to get an indication of a misspelled standard value.

Something along these lines might be worth considering.

1) List of standard values.

2) User can add his custom values (maybe as a separate list) that get preserved across updates.

3) Message that value is not in list. (With note on adding to list?)

4) A suggestion that you might mean a member of the standard list, if the spelling is close enough to one of them.

[Albert Wiersch]

This sounds like a good idea. I'll look into it further for a future major update.

[roedygr]

I'm not sure what to do here. Is this a "common" error (where did these come from)? How would CSE HTML Validator know that you wanted something else instead and that it isn't a "custom" http-equiv value? Perhaps there could be a list of commonly used http-equiv values and if it doesn't match one of those then some message is generated. Thoughts?

Just make it a warning if there is something not in the stardard list. A lot of the time you just need to be notified once in one file, then you fix the problem universally and don't make the misake again. At least that is how it is with me when so much of my HTML is programmatically generated.

[RSteinwand]

How important is it to check for missing metatags?

I always add these, but I bet the page works just fine 99+% of the time without them:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="content-style-type" content="text/css" />
<meta http-equiv="content-script-type" content="text/javascript" />

[Albert Wiersch]

How important is it to check for missing metatags?

I think what is being suggested is to check the given meta tags for known http-equiv values. If a value is unknown, then CSE HTML Validator could display a warning message. This wouldn't be too hard to do if there was a good source for common and correct values that I could use for the check.

Does anyone have any suggestion of where to obtain such a list of common and valid http-equiv values so that I could add such a check? I coudl potentially see this causing more problems than it helping if it generates too many false positives, so I'd need a very good list.

I always add these, but I bet the page works just fine 99+% of the time without them:

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<meta http-equiv="content-style-type" content="text/css" />
<meta http-equiv="content-script-type" content="text/javascript" />

Those shouldn't be that important at all because the default style-type and script-type are already those. The content-type including encoding is best to set through the web server using HTTP headers but in case there is an issue, the "content-type" might come in handy to the browser or user-agent to help it determine the correct encoding... so I might drop all those meta tags except for the "content-type", but this is just my "educated guess".