Re: !DOCTYPE Syntax for Front Page generated code

On Sun, 1 Apr 2007, David Dorward wrote:

> HTML 4.01 Strict is most appropriate for the majority of documents
> authored today.

It might be recommendable for new documents, but the question was about 
code generated by FrontPage. Naturally this depends on FrontPage version 
and the way it has been used, but it's generally somewhat unproductive to 
try to validate the code as HTML 4.01 Strict.

>> I use Tables in my FP HTML other wise it is as simple as I can get.
>> I have Attributes like Bordercolor, Height, font, size, and color in my
>> HTML Code, W3C also dont like these attributes
>
> They are either all either non-standard or deprecated. Presentation
> should be achieved with CSS.

There's a difference between nonstandard and deprecated, and validators as 
such don't take position on deprecation. (Admittedly, the W3C Validator 
responses are scattered with [literally] random links to authoring 
advice, often propagating the same ideas as you. But this is one of the 
fundamental flaws in it and not really a validator feature at all.)

Using HTML 4.01 Transitional is thus more practical. Depending on the 
amount of _nonstandard_ markup, one might even start with a DTD referring 
to an extended document type that allows some common extensions (like 
bordercolor); see the "tag soup DTD" described at
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/own-dtd.html#tagsoup

You might want to proceed piecewise towards HTML 4.01, removing first the 
oddest nonstandard attributes, etc., if you want. It might be a long way, 
though, and generally it's often easier to rewrite a page than to convert 
a wysiwyg editor's product into HTML 4.01 Strict.

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

Received on Sunday, 1 April 2007 19:59:38 UTC