Re: Cols and Rows Required in TextArea

On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Craig Bovis wrote:

> Im just wondering if you can explain the logic of this.

The logic of a validator is to check data against a DTD that you provide
(directly or indirectly). Nothing more, nothing less. Well, to be exact,
some validators also run some heuristic checks beyond that, causing some
confusion.

> We are encouraged to use xhtml with css as a standard

The only thing that a validator will help in that is that you can use it
to check whether your documents comply with the DTD (the formalized part
of the syntax) of the version of XHTML that you regard as standard.

> but using a textarea you are required by
> the validator to use cols and rows.

The validator only reports compliance of your document comply with the DTD
that you specify. It does not require anything. _You_ specify the
requirements (the DTD), and the validator checks, upon your request,
whether they are fulfilled.

> Surely the css width and height
> attributes are what should be used here making cols and rows obsolete?

And what would happen when style sheets are not in use? Besides, there is
no CSS unit corresponding to "average width of a character", and even
specifying so-and-so many rows using CSS requires some care. So CSS has
in fact less "functionality" here than CSS. But these issues have nothing
to do with validation.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Friday, 27 June 2003 02:06:02 UTC