[Bug 22541] <table border=1> isn't considered invalid

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=22541

--- Comment #5 from Michael[tm] Smith <mike@w3.org> ---
(In reply to Ian 'Hixie' Hickson from comment #4)
> That's not news; in studies I did back in 2005 I determined that at least
> 97% of pages were non-conforming in some trivially-detectable way.

There's big difference between that general data and the specific data which
shows that 93% of tables have a border attribute.

> If the problem was that the pages were non-conforming, we could just define
> that anything is conforming. Boom, problem solved, 100% conformance.

Obviously that's reductio ad absurdum. Of course I'm not proposing that.

> That's the not the problem. The problem is that they are using suboptimal
> technologies, have unintentional errors, and so forth.

The very specific problem here is that 93% of tables have a border attribute.
Which is extremely high relative to use of other presentational. So while after
many years of education and outreach about not using presentational markup we
have managed to get the use of it reduced greatly in most all other cases, for
some reason people continue to use the border attribute on tables despite
knowing that it's considered bad presentational markup. I think it's worthwhile
to try to figure out why.

> The job of a validator is to help authors not make these errors, and to use
> optimal technologies.

The job of a validator is also to do that while at the same time not flooding
users with messages about markup cases which they are already well aware are
conformance errors but that they are continuing to use anyway for some reason.

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Received on Saturday, 5 October 2013 03:33:00 UTC