Re: Small website design . . . DTD Modification

At 01:49 PM 10/02/01, you wrote:
> > This means the problem is NOT the DTD my friend, it means there is a
> > compliance issue. By removing "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd" you
> > have simply removed the reference the browser is using to render the
>page -
> > it is now *guessing* how to do it. That means bad things for (document)
> > stability and predictability!!

You are right on the money about this.  Although a DTD is not required by 
the W3C specs, several browsers - notably Mozilla / Netscape 6 and IE6 - 
will try to conform to the specs more closely when a DTD is 
specified.  Using a DTD, therefore, helps ensure that such browsers will 
render pages more closely to the specs, and therefore - in principle- to 
render them more predictably.

Browsers have bugs of course, and so COULD screw up when a DTD is present. 
HOWEVER:  the problem described in this thread APPEARS to be a well known 
issue with Mozilla and its siblings:  the Mozilla organization has 
interpreted the specs a little differently - they believe more correctly - 
and their interpretation results in unexpected gaps between rows in 
tables:  gaps which are most noticeable when using tables to build sliced 
images.

When I have encountered the problem, I have always found this fixed 
it:  use CSS to specify the TR height to the desired height (i.e. the 
height of the images in that row), and to set the TD font-size of cells in 
that row to 1px.  I gave this solution to the person who started this 
thread:  he said that my fix did not fix his problem, but I wonder whether 
he did it right.

The fundamental issue, however, is this:  how important is it to design 
pages in accordance with the specs?  Some argue that the specs are 
irrelevant:  that what is important is what the browsers actually 
do.  Others argue - including myself - that the specs are 
fundamental:  that one should begin by building pages according to the 
specs (which not only means validation and syntax checking, but also 
testing with the most compliant browsers), then to make adjustments to 
allow for idiosyncracies of the real-world browsers.


-
Chuck Upsdell
Email:     cupsdell(at)upsdell.com
Website:   http://www.upsdell.com/

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