Misplaced tfoot element

Under Subject: Re: Add Subject Here
Graham Brown wrote:

> I appear to be having problems with the validator. I am currently
> wrtiting a new textbook for IGCSE ICT and have the folllowing code in
> an example. It appears to be structured correctly yet the validator
> fails it?

In future, please use a descriptive Subject line and include a URL of the 
document you have problems with. (In this case, you included the entire 
document, which isn't very long, so the lack of a URL was not as serious as 
so often.)

> <!-- <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> -->
> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

Why do you have the comment there? It's valid but very pointless: it just 
makes a human reader wonder why it is there, compare it with the doctype 
declaration, etc. Moreover, it has the fairly serious effect of throwing 
Internet Explorer into Quirks Mode.

>     <table border="1">
>       <caption>Fruit sales</caption>
>       <thead>
[...]
>       </thead>
>       <tbody>
[...]
>       </tbody>
>       <tfoot>

As far as validity is concerned, the only problem is that the tfoot element 
is misplaced. The validator says this rather clearly, though somewhat 
abstractly:
'document type does not allow element "TFOOT" here.'

You have put the tfoot element after the thead and tbody elements. This 
sounds natural, but the HTML specifications say that if it is present, it 
must appear before any tbody element. What matters in validation is that 
this rule is formalized in the DTD:

<!ELEMENT TABLE - -
     (CAPTION?, (COL*|COLGROUP*), THEAD?, TFOOT?, TBODY+)>

This says that the contents of a table element consists of the following, in 
this order:
- caption element (optional)
- a sequence of col elements or a sequence of colgroup elements or neither 
of these
- a thead element (optional)
- a tfoot element (optional)
- a sequence of one or more tbody elements.

(I guess the reason for the somewhat odd position of the tfoot element is 
twofold: it was regarded as comparable to the thead element, and people 
could not agree on, or could not just define, the meaning and intended use 
of the tfoot element.)

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

Received on Saturday, 24 January 2009 11:34:53 UTC