RE: XHTML

Todd Fahrner [mailto:fahrner@pobox.com] wrote:
>At 9:47 AM -0700 8/3/99, Chris Wilson wrote:
>>Except that this would be a significant and incompatible change from HTML
>>4.0.
>
>FWIW, all released versions of Internet Explorer for MacOS fail with 
>HTML's checked="checked" syntax. It has been reported to me, however, 
>that they succeed with a boolean checked="true|false" syntax. Would 
>make an interesting backwards compatibility case for changing to a 
>boolean in XHTML if other deployed UAs also recover gracefully from 
>this syntax.

True, and I wouldn't be surprised if Win32 IE supported this also.  However,
that's not what the HTML 4.0 spec says, and I expect there are one or two
other pieces of software that support HTML 4.0, maybe some even correctly...
(Yes, my tongue is firmly in my cheek at this point.)

This oddity, as someone else just mentioned, is a side effect of the
decision to utilize SGML's attribute minimization to allow authors to write
<INPUT CHECKED> instead of <INPUT CHECKED=YES> - SGML doesn't allow you to
put in an attribute name with no value, but it does allow enumerated,
non-conflicting attribute values to be inserted in the tag with no
corresponding name.

-Chris

Received on Tuesday, 3 August 1999 17:04:13 UTC