Re: Why does this validate?

On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Richard Savill wrote:

> <td width="OK_buddy_I_want_50%_width">Test</td>

That's valid and incorrect. :-) That is, it conforms to the DTD,
which is all that it takes to validate, and a validator only
validates. As you remark,

> Second, in any case, percentage is illegal according to even the
> transitional DTD.

But for some reason, this requirement is not imposed in the DTD
(the WIDTH attribute is declared with CDATA, not NUMBER).
Why this is so is an interesting question, but a validator
must take no position in it.

> Yet people use %, and render it in browsers. What's the deal here?

That's a different issue, often discussed in
comp.infosystems.wwww.authoring.html. The short answer is that
percentages are supported _inconsistently_ by browsers (e.g. with
different answers to "% of _what_?").

-- 
Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/ or http://yucca.hut.fi/yucca.html

Received on Friday, 24 September 1999 17:58:39 UTC