Re: CSS1 and tables

On Oct 9, 11:28am, Chris Wilson (PSD) wrote:

>  Really, what you want is a switch that
> the document author could set that says, "this document expects to be
> parsed in strict accordance with the HTMLx DTD, and does not expect to
> have any abnormal stylesheet hacks to match default rendering."

I agree that the author is the one who (should) know about this, not
the individual readers of the document.

> Maybe
> that switch should be linked to the presence of (or the value of) the
> <!DOCTYPE>, I don't know - but that seems like a better route for
> attacking the problem.  Comments?

That seems like a good suggestion. The only thing that would need to change
would be those authoring tools which insert (seemingly random, and often
obselete) doctypes in generated documents on the grounds that they think
they are supposed to.

I note that both HTML 3.2 and 4.0 require the doctype in conforming documents;
HTML 2.0 does not require it but allows it.


> XML, incidentally, does not really have the same legacy-generating
> problems, for two reasons - 1) It's quite strict about how
> error-correction is done, and what the containership model is,

Which is one reason why XML is better.

> and 2)
> there IS no default rendering attached to XML tags; you have to somehow
> link a stylesheet to the elements to control their rendering properties.

and there are no default semantics, either. One reason why XML is worse ;-)

-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
+33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Thursday, 9 October 1997 14:56:54 UTC