RE: Problems with validating <table> elements

Masayasu,

Unfortunately running Tidy doesn't help the development process, it only
fixes problems after the fact.  And the suggestion to use xhtml doesn't work
either, because in the real world we must support a range of browsers, many
of which are unable to render xhtml properly.

Here's why I (and I would imagine many other people as well) want better
table checking:  I'm building a new news site (it's a completely new UI for
http://news.lycos.com/) and there are many complicated routines that turn
xml back-end data into html.  It is important -- during the development
process -- to know if I've closed all the </td> and </tr> tags correctly
because if they're not it likely indicates that I've miscoded something.

Best,
-- Frank Leahy



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Masayasu Ishikawa [mailto:mimasa@w3.org]
> Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2001 3:17 AM
> To: leahy@lycos-inc.com
> Subject: Re: Problems with validating <table> elements
>
>
> "Frank Leahy" <leahy@lycos-inc.com> wrote:
>
> > > In HTML 4, end tag of "td" or "tr" element may be omitted.
> >
> > That's unfortunate, as it makes finding table problems more
> difficult.
> > What's the chance of adding a "strict table elements
> checking" flag to the
> > validator (which I otherwise find very useful)?
>
> I'd rather recommend to use tools like HTML Tidy to automatically
> tidy up your page (e.g. add all optional end tags), or switch
> to XHTML.
>
> Regards,
> --
> Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
> W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 14:14:58 UTC