Validating the width attribute to td element (in XHTML)

I am tracking down an apparent idiosyncracy in the validation of the td
element,
which can be evinced through the W3C validator. I belong to class of purist who
feels that all validators should give the same result and is curious when this
does not happen.

Here is a minimal file which has the problem:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

"http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xhtml1-20000126/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
	<title>Untitled</title>
	<meta name="generator" content="BBEdit 6.5" />
</head>
<body>
<table>
	<tr>
		<td width="25%">
			Left
		</td>
		<td width="25">
			Right
		</td>
	</tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>

Now when I validate this XML against my copy of the dtd the first td element
is considered in error, as 25% is not a number. This file validates without
errors on the W3C validator. The nearest that I can get to deciding why
this is,
is the possibility that the Pixels entity in the DTD is CDATA and the apparent
constraint is not enforceable by a validator. (That statement may be nonsense).

I cannot find any discussion about this on the web or usenet, and at the moment
the search facility at the W3C is down, hence my posting about a problem which
may have a very obvious explanation to the experts here: Perhaps what I take
to be a validator is actually something else.

Incidentally, had it been possible to download the archives as it is
with, say, the conglomerate project
<URL: http://lists.copyleft.no/pipermail/conglomerate/ > then
I would have done so.

I suppose that my being in minority of ones means that everyone
else here has an aversion to plain text bordering on the pathological,
a superfast always-on connection to the Internet and the the latest
version of Internet Whatever that renders fancy pages as quickly as
vi does text.

Ben.

(P.S. And a really good anti-virus program to go with that).
<URL: http://www.computrainer.com/html/improvements_to_3d.html >
<URL: http://rr.sans.org/homeoffice/protecting.php >
<URL: http://mail.lab.net/lists/archive/risks-exploder/2000-May.txt >
<URL: http://www.flipchip.net/win98opt.htm >
<URL: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/20.66.html >
<URL: http://www.videoguys.com/WinME_Tweaks.html >
<URL: http://www.macfixit.com/archives/september.01.b.shtml >
<URL: http://people.ne.mediaone.net/atltech/pmfaq1.html >

Received on Saturday, 19 January 2002 21:32:31 UTC