Contents
This section of the specification describes the basic data types that may appear as an element's content or an attribute's value.
For introductory information about reading the HTML DTD, please consult the SGML tutorial.
Each attribute definition includes information about the case-sensitivity of its values. The case information is presented with the following keys:
If an attribute value is a list, the keys apply to every value in the list, unless otherwise indicated.
The document type declaration specifies the syntax of HTML element content and attribute values using SGML tokens (e.g., PCDATA, CDATA, NAME, ID, etc.). Information on what these tokens mean and how user agents should interpret them may be found in [GOLD90].
The following is a summary of key information:
User agents may ignore leading and trailing white space in CDATA attribute values (e.g., " myval " may be interpreted as "myval"). Authors should not declare attribute values with leading or trailing white space.
For some HTML 4.0 attributes with CDATA attribute values, the specification imposes further constraints on the set of legal values for the attribute that may not be expressed by the DTD.
Although the STYLE and SCRIPT elements use CDATA for their data model, for these elements, CDATA must be handled differently by user agents. Markup and entities must be treated as raw text and passed to the application as is. The first occurrence of the character sequence "</" (end-tag open delimiter) is treated as terminating the end of the element's content. In valid documents, this would be the end tag for the element.
A number of attributes (%Text; in the DTD) take text that is meant to be "human readable". For introductory about attributes, please consult the tutorial discussion of attributes.
This specification uses the term URL for the general case of resource identifiers called "URI" in [RFC1630], including the term "URL" as defined in [RFC1738] and [RFC1808], and the term "URN" as defined in [RFC2141].
URLs are represented in the DTD by the parameter entity %URL.
URLs in general are case-sensitive. There may be URLs, or parts of URLs, where case doesn't matter (e.g., machine names), but identifying these may not be easy. Users should always consider that URLs are case-sensitive.
Relative URLs are resolved to full URLs using a base URL. [RFC1808] defines the normative algorithm for this process. For more information about base URLs, please consult the section on base URLs in the chapter on links.
Please consult the appendix for information about representing non-ASCII characters in URLs.
The attribute value type "color" (%Color) refers to color definitions as specified in [SRGB]. A color value may either be a hexadecimal number (prefixed by a hash mark) or one of the following sixteen color names. The color names are case-insensitive.
| Black = "#000000" | | Green = "#008000" |
| Silver = "#C0C0C0" | | Lime = "#00FF00" |
| Gray = "#808080" | | Olive = "#808000" |
| White = "#FFFFFF" | | Yellow = "#FFFF00" |
| Maroon = "#800000" | | Navy = "#000080" |
| Red = "#FF0000" | | Blue = "#0000FF" |
| Purple = "#800080" | | Teal = "#008080" |
| Fuchsia = "#FF00FF" | | Aqua = "#00FFFF" |
Thus, the color values "#800080" and "Purple" both refer to the color purple.
Although colors can add significant amounts of information to document and make them more readable, please consider the following guidelines when including color in your documents:
HTML specifies three types of length values for attributes:
Length values are case-neutral
Note. A media type (defined in [RFC2045] and [RFC2046]) specifies the nature of a linked resource. This specification employs the term content type rather than media type in accordance with current usage.
This type is represented in the DTD by %ContentType.
Content types are case-insensitive.
Examples of content types include "text/html", "image/png", "image/gif", "video/mpeg", "audio/basic", "text/tcl", "text/javascript", and "text/vbscript". For the current list of registered MIME types, please consult [MIMETYPES].
Note. The content type "text/css", while not current registered with IANA, should be used when the linked resource is a [CSS1] style sheet.
The value of attributes whose type is a language code (%LanguageCode in the DTD) refers to a language code as specified by [RFC1766]. For information on specifying language codes in HTML, please consult the section on language codes. Whitespace is not allowed within the language-code.
The "charset" attributes (%Charset in the DTD) refer to a character encoding as described in the section on character encodings. Values must be strings (e.g., "euc-jp") from the IANA registry (see [CHARSETS] for a complete list). Names for character encodings are case-insensitive.
User agents must follow the steps set out in the section on specifying character encodings in order to determine the character encoding of an external resource.
Certain attributes call for single character from the document character set. These attributes take the %Character type in the DTD.
Single characters may be specified with character references (e.g., "&").
[ISO8601] allows many options and variations in the representation of dates and times. The current specification uses one of the formats described in the profile [DATETIME] for its definition of legal date/time strings (%Datetime in the DTD).
The format is:
YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssTZDwhere:
YYYY = four-digit year
MM = two-digit month (01=January, etc.)
DD = two-digit day of month (01 through 31)
hh = two digits of hour (00 through 23) (am/pm NOT allowed)
mm = two digits of minute (00 through 59)
ss = two digits of second (00 through 59)
TZD = time zone designator
The time zone designator is one of:
Exactly the components shown here must be present, with exactly this punctuation. Note that the "T" appears literally in the string (it must be upper case), to indicate the beginning of the time element, as specified in [ISO8601]
If a generating application does not know the time to the second, it may use the value "00" for the seconds (and minutes and hours if necessary).
Note. [DATETIME] does not address the issue of leap seconds.
Authors may use the following recognized link types, listed here with their conventional interpretations. These are defined as being case-insensitive, i.e., "Alternate" has the same meaning as "alternate". In the DTD, %LinkTypes refers to a space-separated list of link types. White space characters are not permitted within link types.
User agents, search engines, etc. may interpret these link types in a variety of ways. For example, user agents may provide access to linked documents through a navigation bar.
Authors may wish to define additional link types not described in this specification. If they do so, they should use a profile to cite the conventions used to define the link types. Please see the profile attribute of the HEAD element for more details.
For further discussions about link types, please consult the section on links in HTML documents.
The following is a list of recognized media descriptors (%MediaDesc in the DTD).
Future versions of HTML may introduce new values and may allow parameterized values. To facilitate the introduction of these extensions, user agents conforming to this specification must be able to parse the media attribute value as follows:
media="screen, 3d-glasses, print and resolution > 90dpi"
is mapped to:
"screen" "3d-glasses" "print and resolution > 90dpi"
"screen" "3d-glasses" "print"
Note. Style sheets may include media-dependent variations within them (e.g., the CSS @media construct). In such cases it may be appropriate to use "media=all".
The content of the SCRIPT element and the value of intrinsic event attributes is script data (indicated by %Script; in the DTD). As such, this data must not be evaluated by the user agent as HTML markup. The user agent must pass it on as data to a script engine. The case-sensitivity of script data depends on the scripting language.
HTML parsers must be able to recognize script data as beginning immediately after the start tag and ending as soon as the ETAGO ("</") delimiters are followed by a name character ([a-zA-Z]). The script data does not necessarily end with the </SCRIPT> end tag, but is terminated by any "</" followed by a name character.
Consequently, any HTML markup that is meant to be sent to a script engine (which may do whatever it wants with the markup) must be "escaped" so as not to confuse the HTML parser. Designers of each scripting language should recommend language-specific support for resolving this issue.
ILLEGAL EXAMPLE:
The following code is invalid due the to presence of the
"</" characters found, as part of "</EM>", inside the SCRIPT element:
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
document.write ("<EM>This won't work</EM>")
</SCRIPT>
A conforming parser must treat the "</" characters as the end of script data, which is clearly not what the author intended.
In JavaScript, this code can be expressed legally by ensuring that the apparent ETAGO delimiter does not appear immediately before an SGML name start character:
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript">
document.write ("<EM>This will work<\/EM>")
</SCRIPT>
In Tcl, one may accomplish this as follows:
<SCRIPT type="text/tcl">
document write "<EM>This will work<\/EM>"
</SCRIPT>
In VBScript, the problem may be avoided with the Chr() function:
"<EM>This will work<" & Chr(47) & "EM>"
Except for the reserved names listed below, frame target names (%FrameTarget; in the DTD) must begin with an alphabetic character (a-zA-Z). User agents should ignore all other target names.
The following target names are reserved and have special meanings.