RE: frameset and frame borders

On Fri, 21 May 2004, Aapo Romu wrote:

> Answer your question about why to use xhtml is that I'm tidying up the site
> at http://www.excarnation.net (it really has to be done-). Also some new
> cellphones support browsing xhtml sites and I'm guite exited about the
> possibility to get testing it.

I see. But cellphone usage has much more important aspects than XML
conformance. Anyone who wants to create a Web browser that works on small
devices needs to take into account the fact that the great majority of
existing pages is nowhere near XHTML conformance, or even valid with _any_
DTD. And attempts to use XHTML often lead to great confusion especially in
validation (e.g. when people mix old HTML and XHTML); but you seem to be
experienced enough to avoid such traps. And processing documents with
general XML tools would be a good reason to use XHTML.

> However I like xhtml since it's much more
> strictly specified than html.

Well, it is and it isn't. The only difference between HTML 4.01 and
XHTML 1.0 is in the syntactic sugar - basically, at the lexical level
in a broad sense. Admittedly, explicit start and end tags might help
in making authoring more disciplined. But people often miss the fact that
XHTML is _more permissive_ in its formalized syntax, which is all that
matters in validation proper. For example, <a><a></a></a> is incorrect
both in HTML 4.01 and in XHTML 1.0, but a validator will report it as an
error only if you are using an HTML 4.01 DTD.

And this reminds me of an issue with your original question. When I
suggested using things like

    border NUMBER #IMPLIED

in <!ATTLIST>, I didn't remember that this works in old HTML only,
not in XHTML. In XHTML, the keyword NUMBER is not available when declaring
an attribute; you would need to use CDATA. And this means that e.g.
border="O" would pass XHTML validation (here O is the letter capital O,
not digit 0).

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

Received on Friday, 21 May 2004 09:09:10 UTC