Re: XHTML 1.0 Transitional does not accept "justify" ?!?

On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, Bertilo Wennergren wrote:

>   <div align="justify">
> 
> makes a doc invalid if I label it as XHTML 1.0 Transitional, but
> gives no error if I relabel the doc as HTML 4.01 Transitional.
> 
> Is this an oversight in the XHTML Transitional DTD?

Probably. There's no reason to think that the change was intentional;
it would assumably have been mentioned if it were.

HTML 4.01 Transitional DTD contains

<!ENTITY % align "align (left|center|right|justify)  #IMPLIED"
                   -- default is left for ltr paragraphs, right for rtl --
>

and the attribute list declaration for DIV, P, and %heading use that.

XHTML 1.0 Transitional DTD has

<!-- text alignment for p, div, h1-h6. The default is
     align="left" for ltr headings, "right" for rtl -->
<!ENTITY % TextAlign "align (left|center|right) #IMPLIED">

and it is used similarly. So it seems that there was an oversight
when the entity was renamed; somehow justify was dropped away.

This isn't a validator issue as soon as it has been found out that
the problem is in the DTD, not in the software that checks conformance
to a DTD, except perhaps in the sense that a validator might provide
a modified DTD that reflects the assumed _intentions_ behind XHTML.

(On the other hand, justify works _so_ poorly that it should be used
with extreme care only, see http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/www/justify.html
but if such practical considerations had caused the omission of justify
from the DTD, I'm sure it had been mentioned in the XHTML 1.0
specification.)

Perhaps this should thus be taken to the www-html list, but since
this appears to be a technical error only, I'm just Cc'ing this to
the XHTML specification editor.

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

Received on Wednesday, 17 January 2001 01:52:18 UTC