RE: target is invalid attribute for a

Thanks, both.

I’m now more confused than ever.

From what I can tell, the target="_blank" is always valid.  It need not be specific to either HTML 4 or 5, nor to the variants strict, transitional or frameset.  It’s been around a while, and never changed.

I tend to test snippets – equivalent to the contents of a page – because I’m using the Drupal CMS that was set up by a third party.  It generates lots of correctly-identified errors.  I live with that simply because I know it won’t be fixed.  But I like to ensure that my contributions are OK.

So I add snippets directly.  The default options show as:

[cid:image001.png@01D3943E.EFC848C0]

I leave this alone.  I do believe it should not give me an error message.

But thanks again.  I appreciate your very fast responses.  I can live with this problem too, but thought you folks would want everything to work as well as possible (recognizing that there are very few bug-free programs – including those I write).

- Ed



ED BRANDON
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From: David Dorward [mailto:david@dorward.me.uk]
Sent: January-23-18 11:31 AM
To: Philip Taylor
Cc: Ed Brandon; www-validator@w3.org
Subject: Re: target is invalid attribute for a


On 23 Jan 2018, at 16:07, Philip Taylor (RHUoL) wrote:

I would suspect an inappropriate DOCTYPE.  The following is valid :

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Strict//EN">

That causes the validator to chuck a massive warning because the Document Type (-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Strict//EN) is not in the validator's catalog.

If you use the real HTML 4.01 Strict DTD:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"

        "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

… then the validator will report the document as being invalid with the error Ed mentioned.

It would be valid if the Transitional DTD was used:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"

        "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

… but 2017 is leaving it more than a little late to start transitioning to HTML 4.

It is also valid with the HTML 5 Doctype:

<!DOCTYPE html>

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Received on Tuesday, 23 January 2018 16:40:45 UTC