target attribute legal in HTML 4.01 Strict?

Hello all.  I sent this to the list a few days ago, but I never saw a
response to it and it doesn't show up in the web archive, so I'll risk
annoying some folks and post it again.

I was running a validation on some PHP-generated code to make sure
everything was being spit out properly, and came across this one error which
prevented validation:

   ... a href=http://some.link.here/ target="_blank">link text ...
Error: there is no attribute "TARGET" for this element (in this HTML
version)

Wondering about this and how anybody would manage to write a framed site
using the strict HTML 4.01 DTD, I popped over to
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/frames.html#adef-target and found this
in the spec:

"By assigning a name to a frame via the name attribute, authors can refer to
it as the "target" of links defined by other elements. The target attribute
may be set for elements that create links (A, LINK), image maps (AREA), and
forms (FORM)."

A quick check through Appendix A of the spec doesn't show any errors
referring to that particular passage.  Is there something I'm missing, or is
this possibly just an oversight in the validator's parser?

Curious....

-Davydd Cook

Received on Wednesday, 13 February 2002 22:05:24 UTC