The Don (no, not that one) lodged a complaint to the W3C because of a recent change to their HTML validator. All of a sudden, pages that have been valid for a decade (no joke) are now deemed "broken" because they use this doctype:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//Netscape Comm. Corp.//DTD HTML//EN">
Finding examples of broken pages is left as an exercise for the reader:
If you need a URL, Google for "don" and take the topmost page, unless you are in France.
And if you need more proof who is being a bozo here, consider the imposition the W3C is making of the world:
To change all these pages will cost me a week's time. I don't want to delay The Art of Computer Programming by an unnecessary week; I've been working on it for 43 years and I have 20 more years of work to do, and who knows what illnesses and other tragedies are in store. Every week is precious, especially when it seems to me that there is no valid validation reason for a competent computer system person to be so fascistic. For all I know, you'll be making me spend another week on this next year, and another the year after that.
(Steven DeRose responded with a few ideas on how to fix the problem. "One week" may be a slight exaggeration on the Professor's part, but not by much. Fixing the validator is certainly the easier path.)
I think it was a perfectly reasonable choice to no longer support that doctype. The local repository of DTDs was getting hard to maintain, so the developers made a choice to drop the copies of proprietary DTDs they kept around as a courtesy. Note these DTDs have never been standardised; they were concoctions conceived by various companies, and for all intents and purposes, support of the Netscape DTD is tied to the whims and fate of whoever it is who currently owns the Netscape brand and assets. The validator developrs never made a committment to support those proprietary DTDs – as opposed to the W3C-ratified doctypes, which will remain supported forever, regardless of age.
Even so, given an actual copy of a non-standard DTD, the validator will continue to accept the professor’s documents forever. The problem is that these documents name a proprietary DTD, but do not indicate the location of a copy.
Knuth argues that his documents are displayed correctly in many different versions of many different browsers. But that proves nothing; they would render his documents correctly, even if it was invalid according to all existing standard and proprietary DTDs! Browsers don’t care one bit about validity. By definition, then, they can’t be the benchmark that the validator is measured against either.
