Re: Is this legal XHTML 1.1?

Hi Elliotte, dear list members,


Am Sonntag, 8. Dezember 2002 22:07 schrieb Elliotte Rusty Harold:
> At 9:09 PM +0100 12/8/02, Christian Wolfgang Hujer wrote:
> >By the way, I'm curious, what the width and language attribute for? What
> >browsers require them?
>
> The language attribute is to make sure that all browsers recognize
> the script as JavaScript, including older browsers that don't pick up
> on type=""text/javascript"
But isn't javascript the default scripting language in those browsers, so they 
take javascript as a default when the language attribute of the script 
element has no value?

> The width attribute is just to set the width of a table column, again
> for older browsers that don't recognize CSS.
Are there still such browsers out there? Even Netscape 4 knows CSS.
Though I know that neither Netscape4 or Internet Explorer including 6.0 nor 
Opera or Konqueror handle percentages or values like 10em very well in CSS 
for td/th elements.
They always get problems.
A perfect browser? There still is no such thing.
Sigh.
But from time to time some browser comes quite close to that goal.
Currently this is Mozilla, I think. Whenever I want a quick first shot of what 
is right and what is wrong, I take a look at Mozilla to see the correct 
rendering (though also Mozilla renders some stuff wrong, I don't rely on 
that). At least Mozilla knows HTML far better than IE, which even does not 
know all HTML 4 elements.

> Mozilla does seem to be falling back to the old definition of the
> width attribute for the td element, despite this page being served as
> application/xhtml+xml. However, if a CSS width style is present that
> appears to override the manually speciifed width.
I think clearification of that is definitely required.
Have you already filed a bug report about that to Mozilla.org?
Not that this really is a bug, but it's always good to have some people of 
Mozilla.org joining that discussion.

I have just taken a look at the legacy module of XHTML Modularization, and it 
contains both, the width attribute for td and the language attribute for 
script. So user agents may have semantics / behaviour associated with these 
attributes, since authors still might use them - the paragraph stating the 
deprecation says "should not", not "must not".

So I as a user agent author would implement XHTML Modularization, Ruby, CSS, 
MathML and SVG. I'd not parse the DTD in search for a legacy module entity. 
I'd just parse the DTD to check the document for well-formedness and perhaps 
validity, but I'd not parse the DTD for violations of deprecation, though 
this might be a good optional idea.


Bye
-- 
ITCQIS GmbH
Christian Wolfgang Hujer
Geschäftsführender Gesellschafter
Telefon: +49  (0)89  27 37 04 37
Telefax: +49  (0)89  27 37 04 39
E-Mail: Christian.Hujer@itcqis.com
WWW: http://www.itcqis.com/

Received on Sunday, 8 December 2002 19:03:43 UTC