Re: No "target" allowed

On Thu, 2004-05-27 at 16:11, Bernhard Kraft wrote:
> I have a short question about the HTML Validator.
> 
> If I validate a document with DOCTYPE
> HTML 4.01 Strict
> It tells me that there is no "target" attribute
> allowed.

This is because HTML 4.01 Strict does not include the target attribute.

However... it seems your question is actually about HTML 4.01 Strict and
not the validator.

> What is the sense of this.

The target attribute can be considered logical or presentational. It
can't be considered to describe the data, thus it is deprecated in HTML
4.01 and does not appear in the Strict DTD.

> Each link NEEDS an target attribute if the target
> is the same page (_top)

Page? Not so, you can not target a page. Perhaps you mean frame or
window?

>  or a new one (_blank) 

Ah, window.

> how else could one programm a website where users can
> click links belonging to the website which shouldn't
> open a new window.

<a href="foo">. The default is target="_self". You would only need to
use _top if you were working in a frameset. There are numerous reasons
why you should not use frames, but if you do you should use the
Transitional DTD for the documents to be loaded into them

>  and links going to "outside"
> pages where the target should be _blank.

Why should links to other sites force a new window on the user? Browsers
contain perfectly good methods that allow a user to open a new window if
they so choose.

Unfortunately I have lost the reference, but I recently saw a report
written after observing users testing a website. Some links opened new
windows to Amazon.com - this caused a significant number of users great
difficulty because the back button was greyed out.

> So what is the default behavour (of browsers) when clicking
> a link without target : Open in a new window or in
> the existing one ?

Try it and see? It is to use the current window.

> Isn't Strict a little bit too strict ???

No. IMO it isn't strict enough as it still contains such presentational
elements as <b> and <i>.

-- 
David Dorward       <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/>   <http://dorward.me.uk/>

Received on Thursday, 27 May 2004 13:52:09 UTC