note from Prof Knuth

Dear Olivier,

Thanks for the detailed reply, which contained the info that I needed.
The "vertical-align:middle" feature is better than "absmiddle" ever was.

With the help of emacs, I've now converted all my webpages (except the
historic ones) to HTML 4.01 Transitional, and I validated 75 of them.
The remaining 700 pages all have similar format, so I used random sampling
and found nothing amiss there. Going to CSS made it possible to improve
many pages, making them download faster, once I realized that about 1500
images all had the same height and width and that this information could
easily be encoded as part of the style.

I do think that alt="" and other kinds of alt specs could well have
been considered part of the style sheet, implied by the class attribute.
But that's a quibble.

You needn't take time to reply to this note. I just wanted to let you
know that there was a happy ending to the trauma you inflicted last week!

Cordially, Don Knuth

Received on Friday, 23 September 2005 20:32:31 UTC