Re: Alt attribute for unimportant images

On Tue, 11 Jul 2000 20:39:16 -0400, Christian Smith
<csmith@barebones.com> wrote:

>On Wednesday, July 12, 2000 at 1:14 AM, jrexon@newsguy.com (Jan Roland Eriksson) wrote:
>> There is _no_ browser produced for "wide public use" that cares about
>> DTDs at all. (they all just ignore DTD references, and that's a fact)

>It may be a fact but it's not true.

Oh yes, it's true. You are only getting things a bit mixed up.

>IE 5.0 for the Mac makes significant use of DTDs.

A 'DTD' is a 'Document Type Definition' that usually exists as a
separate text file on some system. It contains element, attribute and
entity definitions among other things, to _define_ the syntax of some
markup language, e.g. HTML4.01

A '<!DOCTYPE...' declaration is a reference to such an external 'DTD'
that you use at the top of your marked up page to indicate where to find
the syntax definition (i.e. the DTD) for your markup.

Until proven wrong by a reliable source, I still say that _no_ browser
produced for "wide public use" (including MacIE5 and iCab) will care to
use a <!DOCTYPE... declaration to make an extra HTTP request to download
an external DTD and use it to process a marked up page.

>The presence of a 4.0 Strict Doctype puts IE into standards
>compliant mode for instance.

Which is using a <!DOCTYPE... declaration for a purpose it was never
designed to handle. That use of <!DOCTYPE... is wrong and I have made
that view of mine very clear on several occasions.

>iCab for the Macintosh also makes use of the Doctype.

Yes, but _not_ to load an external syntax definition as in a DTD.
iCab has a built in HTML checker but it's not DTD driven validator in
the SGML sense of the word.

-- 
Jan Roland Eriksson <jrexon@newsguy.com>
<URL:http://member.newsguy.com/%7Ejrexon/>

Received on Wednesday, 12 July 2000 12:35:03 UTC