Re: Error Message Feedback

On Thu, 2006-01-26 at 11:26 -0800, webmaster wrote:
> However -- as far as <TABLE> is concerned there appears to be a
> disconnect between your published standard and what the industry
> practices in their browsers.

Yes, as mentioned there are proprietary extensions (some of which are
later proposed to become standard) and error handling capabilities.

> My HTML editor does not allow <TBODY>, <THEAD> or <TFOOT> 

That's a shame. I suggest you complain to the authors of the editor, or
switch to a better tool. I'm quite fond of Emacs and JEdit.

> and if I force it then I.E.-6 does not display correctly.

I just created a test page using thead, tfoot and tbody according to
spec. My copy of IE 6 had no problems rendering it correctly (including
displaying the tfoot element at the end of the table).

> Also, <CAPTION> is allowed for all four sides, not just one time as you
> proclaim. Why would it not?

What table would have four captions? It doesn't make sense.

> <THEAD> is replaced by <TH> and it works as intended.

<thead> and <th> do entirely different jobs.

> <BORDERCOLOR> is also recognized and displayed very well.

The border-color CSS property is very well supported, I'd guess support
would be rather better then for "<bordercolor>".

> <COLS> you claim is not allowed but HTML editors recognize it as legal.

You editor is buggy then. There is a <col> element and a <colgroup>
element, but not a <cols> element. A bit of Googling doesn't turn up any
reference to such an element (admittedly its difficult to find such a
reference given the number of pages which mention the col element and
the cols attribute). 

> Why would it not be if it helps the browser to process the TABLE request
> faster?

Well, we do have col and colgroup which, presumably, do whatever your
imaginary cols element does.

> Guys, maybe you were there first, but Microsoft decided to do it
> differently. And Microsoft wins since it has 97% of the market.

It's down to somewhere in the high 80s now IIRC (not that it is possible
to gather accurate statistics on the subject).

> Perhaps you should adapt or risk becoming irrelevant in the future?

More and more webpage authors are waking up to the standards, Microsoft
is putting an effort into being better at following the standards in the
next release of Internet Explorer, while Firefox, Safari, Opera and
Konqueror already have extremely good support for HTML 4.01 and CSS 2 as
well as decent support for XHTML 1.x.

Aside from that, the Markup Validator checks for conformance to the
specs, the HTML working group is responsible for writing them. Contact
details can be found in the specification. http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/

(I read the mailing list, please direct responses there and do not CC
me. Thanks)

-- 
David Dorward                           <http://dorward.me.uk/>
"Anybody remotely interesting is mad, in some way or another."
                             -- The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Received on Thursday, 26 January 2006 20:56:58 UTC