- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 09:58:10 +0200 (EET)
- To: Helyn Davenport <helyn@pixiport.com>
- Cc: www-validator@w3.org
On Sat, 26 Feb 2005, Helyn Davenport wrote: > I ran your test on my site www.pixiport.com page I have errors but do not > understand what to do. The basic problem is that the DOCTYPE declaration at the start of the page claims that the markup used is HTML 3.2, which is the old specification that was superseded by HTML 4.0 (and later HTML 4.01) long ago. If you first try to validate the document so that the DOCTYPE has been replaced by <!DOCTYPE HTML SYSTEM "http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/tagsoup.dtd"> (which is a homebrew "tag soup HTML" or "HTML at large" syntax description, see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/own-dtd.html ) using the http://www.htmlhelp.com/tools/validator/ service - since the W3C markup validator has some builtin limitations - you will get two messages about apparently unintentional markup errors: there's an ALT attribute in an A element (where it is not allowed and does not do any good since no browser recognizes it - use the TITLE attribute instead) and there is a missing ALT attribute in one IMG element. After fixing those, you might proceed to using a HTML 4.01 Transitional DOCTYPE (and now you can use the W3C validator) to see how the markup used deviates from the published specification. It's a matter of nonstandard browser-dependent attributes. What you do with them is your choice; the validator can only compare the markup with a document type definition and report the mismatches. In practice, you could replace the attributes by the use of a style sheet relatively easily (though with the implication that in some currently rare old browsers the page won't look exactly as now, since they don't have good enough style sheet support). Regarding the nonstandard attributes in <body> for example, you could use body { margin: 0; padding: 0; } in CSS, but for additional notes see http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www/margins.html Next you might proceed to a HTML 4.01 Strict DOCTYPE. There you would find some presentational attributes that have been removed from the Strict version. It seems to me that it would be relatively easy to replace them by style sheet rules as well. (The toughest part would probably be the align="center" attribute in a <table> element; regarding that, see http://theodorakis.net/tablecentertest.html ) On the other hand, moving from Transitional to Strict is largely a matter of principle, rather than something that has immediate practical benefits. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Sunday, 27 February 2005 07:58:42 UTC