Re: Clean up the "Three Flavor" Mess

I could swear I replied to this post by Bertilo Wennergren a couple of
weeks ago, but my message got lost in the ether.  Here it goes
again...

> The transitional version is needed also for those who want to use
> frames. The attribute "target" is not in the strict version. Frames
> without any means of referring to them are pretty useless. So if
> we ditch transitional we'll have to ditch the frameset DTD as well.

Or produce a single DTD which includes what's in the Strict DTD plus
the relevant frame-related elements and attributes.  This will,
however, require the W3C to make the distinction of whether 'iframe'
was "deprecated" because it is related to frames, or because it should
be replaced by the 'object' element, and in turn raise the issue of
whether the 'name' attribute of the 'object' attribute should be used
for targeting in that case.

I can forsee the need to maintain a Transitional DTD at each level of
(X)HTML, as more historical features are deprecated.  E.g., 'font'
would not appear in any DTD at the next level, but constructs
currently included in the Strict DTD (e.g., the 'name' attribute for
the 'a' element, or even the 'img' element--which may someday be
deprecated in favor of 'object') would be relegated to a new
Transitional DTD.
					John T. Whelan
					whelan@iname.com
					http://www.slack.net/~whelan/

Received on Tuesday, 18 May 1999 05:17:05 UTC