Re: Table alignment problem

On 2/28/01 at 12:02 PM, Captain F.M. O'Lary <ctfuzzy(at)canopy.net> wrote:

> 1) Remove this:
> 
> <.!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
> "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
> 
> 2) Put in this:
> 
> <.!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
> 
> 3) Submit it to this:
> 
> http://validator.w3.org
> 
> until it validates.

Fuzzy,

When was the last time you actually read the documents at w3.org? :-)
Here are a few choice morsels:

> W3C recommends that user agents and authors (and in particular,
> authoring tools) produce HTML 4.01 documents rather than HTML 4.0
> documents. W3C recommends that authors produce HTML 4 documents
> instead of HTML 3.2 documents. For reasons of backward compatibility,
> W3C also recommends that tools interpreting HTML 4 continue to support
> HTML 3.2 and HTML 2.0 as well.

Note the recommendation that browsers offer some backward support for
3.2. You better hope they do so or your business is dead in the water.
And:

> In addition to the text, multimedia, and hyperlink features of the
> previous versions of HTML (HTML 3.2 [HTML32] and HTML 2.0 [RFC1866]),
> HTML 4 supports more multimedia options, scripting languages, style
> sheets, better printing facilities, and documents that are more
> accessible to users with disabilities. HTML 4 also takes great strides
> towards the internationalization of documents, with the goal of making
> the Web truly World Wide.

And:

> XHTML 1.0 is W3C's recommendation for the latest version of HTML,
> following on from earlier work on HTML 4.01, HTML 4.0, HTML 3.2 and
> HTML 2.0. With a wealth of features, XHTML 1.0 is a reformulation of
> HTML 4.01 in XML, and combines the strength of HTML4 with the power of
> XML.

Wait, there's more:

> XHTML 1.0 Strict - Use this when you want really clean structural
> mark-up, free of any tags associated with layout. Use this together
> with W3C's Cascading Style Sheet language (CSS) to get the font,
> color, and layout effects you want.

> XHTML 1.0 Transitional - Many people writing Web pages for the general
> public to access might want to use this flavor of XHTML 1.0. The idea
> is to take advantage of XHTML features including style sheets but
> nonetheless to make small adjustments to your mark-up for the benefit
> of those viewing your pages with older browsers which can't understand
> style sheets. These include using BODY with bgcolor, text and link
> attributes.

Note that last paragraph: "Many people writing Web pages for the general
public to access . . ." --- that sure describes me and what I do for a
living.

DTD 3.2 was adopted in 1996. Things change. Use 3.2 if you want. But why
do you always feel the need to slam the recommendations of W3C, the same
organization to which you choose to validate? And how come your own
portfolio is largely absent of 3.2 documents (other than your personal
pages)?

Ken


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