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

[barnacle.livejournal.com]

Me too. Do you think LiveJournal 0.2 will use something like wiki-ish?

If %flow; is %block;|%inline;, then it's either but not both. But then what does (%flow;)* mean, which is the content of LI elements? Does it mean lots of block XOR lots of inline, or does it mean lots of things, each of which can either be block or inline? My answer is a shrug.

It seems that DTD and schema validation could produce different results with your version. Given that in the schema Flow is an extension of a complexType (which can contain #PCDATA), then yours should work there; in the DTD (%flow;)* might match something that itself matches %inline;%block;, or it might not.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Oh, arsebiscuits, sorry about LJ's HTML-eating, there; there really really needs to be a "verbatim" setting where nothing gets auto-interpretedbollocksed. (I suppose the standard OSS answer applies: if I want it, I should write it rather than whinging.) Did what I said make any sense in the email notification?

Coming back to yer blocks/inlines, I am pretty sure (after some hasty revision of what SGML knowledge I used to have) that %block;|%inline means one-or-more block XOR one-or-more inline.