Re: Problem with validator and client side Image Map

On Mon, 16 Feb 2004, Beton, Richard wrote:

> Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
> You're using XHTML 1.1, which is incompatible with XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4
>
> and, more seriously, with browsers.
>
> Not correct.

Well, that's irrelevant as far as validation goes. I was just pointing at
the fact that XHTML 1.1 does not work on the Web, and failure to realize
this is probably the practical source of the OP's confusion.

> Mozilla supports XHTML 1.1 - -
> So does Opera

That's what they say. And they support most of XHTML 1.1, but partly in
odd ways, and surely there are holes in the support - including cases like
the one discussed.

> IE6 doesn't specifically support XHTML 1.1

Oh, please. IE 6 does not support XHTML 1.1, period.

> but it seems to
> cope satisfactorily with it all the same.

The operative word being "seems". Try serving IE 6 a document in a manner
required by the XHTML 1.1 specification, including the media type, and you
will see.

> This has hit on perhaps the main backward compatibility issue with XHTML
> w.r.t HTML: the replacement of the 'name' attribute with 'id'.

No, it's just one detail - though the one under discussion now.

> As a workaround, the <map>
> element needs both 'id' and 'name' attributes to work in a wide range of
> browsers.

No, it only needs 'name'. Using 'id' adds no functionality. And it won't
even give you compliance with XHTML 1.1, since you still need 'name'.

> So I chose to use XHTML 1.0
> Transitional (which still allows 'name') for those pages.

That's what I was saying (except that I proposed a more systematic
solution). But you need not switch to Transitional. If your document
is XHTML 1.1 compliant (which really means nothing but compliance to
a useless specification), then it can be converted to XHTML 1.0 Strict
compliant in a straighforward manner.

> The older tag-soup SGML flavours of HTML are bettered by XML, IMHO (and
> in my experience).

Tag soup has very little to do with SGML - much more with XML.

In fact, SGML validation detects much more markup errors than XML
validation, simply because XML is a more limited metalanguage.
This is often confused with the fact that XML based markup systems like
XHTML have more simplistic syntax rules which forbid much of the syntactic
variation allowed in SGML.

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

Received on Monday, 16 February 2004 13:49:57 UTC