- From: Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt@lachy.id.au>
- Date: Thu, 07 Apr 2005 16:55:52 +1000
- To: ryan@getnicestudios.com
- CC: www-validator@w3.org
Christopher Ryan McVinney wrote: > Lachlan Hunt wrote: >> The validator is correct, it is an invalid attribute. > > That is incorrect, it IS a valid attribute these days, According to...? Well, it is certainly *not* in the HTML 4.01 recommendation [1]. Therefore, it is *not valid* and *non-conformant*. It is, and always will be, a proprietary non-standard presentational attribute that *should not* be used. > and that is why I was writing to the w3c regarding its use. > It should be defined in the 4.01 transitional html dtd, > and I do not know why it isn't. Because the HTML 4 recommendation should not be updated to include every non-standard proprietary, presentational attribute. Presentational aspects like this allowtransparency is something that should be specified in a stylesheet, if ever. Although, there is currently no alternative available in CSS for this attribute, I suggest you remove the attribute anyway. > Microsoft created it, I 'll give you that, but check it out in any other > browser's latest version and it works across the board. Wide spread use and implementation among the popular browsers to cope with large number of people like yourself that make use of and depend upon non-standard proprietary attributes to make their pages render correctly is not a reason for it to be standardised. There are lots of proprietary extensions copied by other browsers simply to cope with all the pages designed and tested with only one browser in mind. If they did not, unfortunately, many pages simply wouldn't work and everyone would be stuck with the worst browser availalbe: IE. So, just because browsers are forced to implement these things in order to gain any market share, is not a reason for any proprietary extensions to be standardised. In fact, all the elements and attributes available in the Transitional DTD have been deprecated for quite some time, and their use is also not recommended, and new versions of (X)HTML have dropped transitional features completely. > It should be defined in the dtd. This is the question I am asking - > why is it not validating? It will never become a standardised attribute, and will never validate in an official HTML DTD. But if you simply want to get past the validator without caring about conformance, you can use a custom DTD [2]. > In other words, why has it not been added, still, > when many developers are using it successully in every browser... > at what point does it become a valid attribute, if not then? Every browser? Please define what you mean by "every browser". If you've included more than just IE, Mozilla, Opera and maybe Safari, I'll be very surprised. If allow transparency works in all of the following plus many more, you may be able to claim "every browser", but I guarentee not all of these do: IE, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, OmniWeb, Konqueror, kHTML, Lynx, Amaya, Mosaic, WebTV, and many more... Lastly, "HTML validation is just a tool" [3] may be a good article for you to read, as it will help explain the difference between the formal process of validation, and true conformance with HTML. Although you can use a custom DTD to get past a validator, such documents are still non-conformant HTML documents. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/ [2] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/own-dtd.html [3] http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/validation.html -- Lachlan Hunt http://lachy.id.au/ http://GetFirefox.com/ Rediscover the Web http://GetThunderbird.com/ Reclaim your Inbox
Received on Thursday, 7 April 2005 06:55:58 UTC