This is an ex-HTML

[j4]

Okay, I think I'm going mad. I put the following into our CMS:

<ul>
<li> Item 1
<ul>
<li> SubItem 1</li>
<li> SubItem 2</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li> Item 2</li>
</ul>

and it (silently, without any notification) 'corrected' it to the following:

<ul>
<li>Item 1
<ul></ul></li>
<li>SubItem 1</li>
<li>SubItem 2</li>
<li>Item 2</li></ul>

I pointed this out to the people who are setting up the new site for us, and they raised it as a support call with the CMS people, and got the following response:

"Could you please use the following schema:

<ul>
<li>Item 1</li>
<ul>
<li>SubItem 1</li>
<li>SubItem 2</li>
</ul>
<li>Item 2</li>
</ul>

Such syntax is formatted correctly."

If such syntax is formatted correctly, why doesn't it validate? I'm not even trying to be a validation Nazi about this (it's not as if anything that comes out of this CMS is ever going to validate anyway), it's more that I don't really want to have to 'correct' all our existing HTML to prevent it being 'corrected' by the CMS.

Comments

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'd try and raise it as a bug

I'd feel much more confident about doing that if my readership had reached a consensus on whether the auto-corrected version and/or the suggested correction were correct or not. :-/

what CMS are you using out of curiosity?

Sitecore (http://www.sitecore.com/). It's probably very nice if you want something that looks/feels like Windows XP and which doesn't require you to see any of those nasty angle-brackety things. :-/

[rgl.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much positive that your version is right and theirs is wrong. I tend to use http://validator.w3.org to get a definitive answer on such things, though it only works with complete pages rather than fragments.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I've wrapped that fragment in a test page (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~janetmck/amirightornot.html) and you're right, it doesn't validate (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chiark.greenend.org.uk%2F%7Ejanetmck%2Famirightornot.html&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline).

Now, how do I go about telling software developers who are senior to me (and who know I'm not in a "technical" role) that they're wrong?

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

"Can you clarify what you mean by valid, as this seems to fail on the W3C validation test server?"

"Clarify" is a great word for this situation.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Magic - thank you!

(I'm afraid all my politeness generators are out of whack at the moment, as a bug in the code means that they convert everything to "AGGGGHHHHHH! COCKING COCKMONSTERS!" - which is formatted correctly.)

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I got that error from gcc only last week. Apparently your cock has to be UTF-8, and bend in the middle like a real cock should.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

UTF-8 cocks are also self-synchronizing, which is convenient.

[j4.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I'm following all this stuff about how UTF-8 cocks work... do you think you boys could show me?

[imc.livejournal.com]

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

That's straight out of the ISO-8859-COCK codepage. In UTF-8 you'll need:

0xE2 B3

[j4.livejournal.com]

It's an optical illusion, right? I mean, they're actually both the same size.

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

Yeah, when they're in use, but the second cock takes up more storage space while being in theory more portable across cockplementations.

It's one step in undoing the damage caused by the Tower of Cockle.