Re: "value" attribute deprecated

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004, olivier Thereaux wrote:

> This attribute has been deprecated for a reason: it's probably not very
> useful anyway.

For a reason, yes. For a sufficient reason? Debatable. Generally,
presentational features in HTML have been deprecated - but not all.
This has been explained so that features that cannot be replaced by the
use of CSS have not been deprecated (yet). But this is hardly the whole
truth. In particular, the "value" attribute in <li> elements _cannot_ be
replaced by the use of CSS.

A validator knows nothing of this, of course. It simply does its job, and
"deprecated" means nothing to it. Only the DTD matters. For further
confusion, although elements and attributes that have been deprecated are
_mostly_ the same as those that belong to the Transitional DTD only (i.e.,
not to the Strict DTD), this is not always the case. For example, the
"target" attribute does not belong to the Strict DTD, but it has not been
deprecated (by a statement in the HTML specification that says that it is
deprecated).

On the practical side, it is always possible to dispense with the "value"
attribute in <li> if you include the numbering of the items into the
document's text data (<li>36. text text</li>), in which case you naturally
want to use <ul> with list-style-type: none, instead of <ol>.

> But if you really want to use it, no problem, just use a
> document type that includes it, such as HTML 4.01 transitional.

Indeed (though stay tuned to getting bashed by people who don't understand
the issue :-)).

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

Received on Friday, 3 September 2004 06:19:17 UTC