[ tidy-Bugs-1272404 ] Warning: <form> attribute "action" lacks value

Bugs item #1272404, was opened at 2005-08-25 15:06
Message generated for change (Comment added) made by c960657
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Category: HTML/XML/XHTML Parser
Group: Current - all platforms
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Priority: 5
Submitted By: Christian Schmidt (c960657)
Assigned to: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)
Summary: Warning: <form> attribute "action" lacks value

Initial Comment:
I have a file containing the following line:
<form action="" method="get">

Tidy outputs the following:
line 9 column 5 - Warning: <form> attribute "action"
lacks value

My document is HTML 4.01 Strict. The action attribute
is specified as %URI. The specification mentions RFC
2396 as normative reference for the definition of URIs.

RFC 2396, section 4.2 states:

"[...] in the case of HTML's FORM element, [...] an
empty URI reference represents the base URI of the
current document and should be replaced by that URI
when transformed into a request."

In other words, the empty string is explicitly allowed
as a URI reference.

Therefore, I believe that Tidy shouldn't issue a
warning in this case.

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>Comment By: Christian Schmidt (c960657)
Date: 2005-08-26 13:32

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=32013

Perhaps I just don't understand the distinction between
Info, Warning and Error. Are these described somewhere?

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Comment By: Björn Höhrmann (hoehrmann)
Date: 2005-08-25 17:48

Message:
Logged In: YES 
user_id=188003

Yes and no. There might be good reasons to generate a 
warning here, e.g., the user might use scripting for form 
submission and only include the action attribute to satisfy 
some validator. In this case this could be an accessibility 
problem and an a11y warning would be appropriate. There 
might also be compatibility problems if the document uses 
the <base> element.

I don't disagree though, if anyone fixes this there should 
be a comment in the source to indicate that we might warn 
about this once we have a better reporting system that 
allows to indicate less confident messages.

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