[Docutils-develop] [docutils:feature-requests] #94 Should docutils whine about nesting simple body elements?

[Günter M. <mi...@us...>]

- **status**: open --> open-fixed
- **Group**:  --> Default
- **Comment**:

In Docutils 0.22 (since [r9732]), you can validate a  Document Tree element (`nodes.Element` instance) and its children by calling its `validate()` method. 
There is also a "transform" that checks a complete document after parsing and reports validation problems as WARNING system messages. It can be activated with the [validate](https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/user/config.html#validate) configuration setting.

The new "xml" parser validates the parsing result by default, so if you save the source
~~~
<paragraph classes="availability">
    <inline classes="xref std std-ref">Availability:</inline>
    Unix, not WASI.
    <paragraph>Content of the "availability" directive.</paragraph>
</paragraph>
~~~
to a file foo.xml, say, and run
    
    docutils --parser=xml --writer=pseudoxml foo.xml

the result is
~~~
<document source="/tmp/foo.xml">
    <paragraph classes="availability">
        
        <inline classes="xref std std-ref">
            Availability:
        
        Unix, not WASI.
        <paragraph>
            Content of the "availability" directive.
        
    <section classes="system-messages">
        <title>
            Docutils System Messages
        <system_message level="2" line="4" source="/tmp/foo.xml" type="WARNING">
            <paragraph>
                Element <paragraph classes="availability"> invalid:
                  Child element <paragraph> not allowed at this position.
~~~
The original example would also complain about the unknown node `<pending_xref>` as this is an extension by Sphinx.



---

**[feature-requests:#94] Should docutils whine about nesting simple body elements?**

**Status:** open-fixed
**Group:** Default
**Created:** Thu Feb 09, 2023 09:55 AM UTC by Julien Palard
**Last Updated:** Thu May 11, 2023 08:00 AM UTC
**Owner:** nobody


Context:

[This](https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/45fa12aec8f508c224a1521cfe3ae597f1026264/Doc/tools/extensions/pyspecific.py#L149) call to `nested_parse` adds a `Paragraph` node to a `Paragraph` node,  this look forbidden by [the doc](https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/doctree.html#body-elements), and it also look to misbehave sphinx-side, when translating the document, where we completly loose the nested paragraph once translated.

It renders properly though when **not** translated.

The linked `nested_parse` returns:

```xml
<paragraph classes="availability">
    <pending_xref refdoc="index" refdomain="std" refexplicit="True" reftarget="availability" reftype="ref" refwarn="True">
        <inline classes="xref std std-ref">
            Availability
    : 
    Unix, not Emscripten, not WASI.
    <paragraph>
        Hello world I'm the content of the "availability" directive.
```

If it's really something that should not be done, maybe some kind of warning at build time could help debugging those issues?



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