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Bug 22425 - Clarify the correct use of the <border> attribute. Validators (w3 and validator.nu) consider it conforming and W3 specifications, in both versions 5 and 5.1WD, allow it "for non-presentational purpose [...]
Summary: Clarify the correct use of the <border> attribute. Validators (w3 and validat...
Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME
Alias: None
Product: WHATWG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other other
: P3 normal
Target Milestone: Unsorted
Assignee: Ian 'Hixie' Hickson
QA Contact: contributor
URL: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2013-06-23 11:32 UTC by contributor
Modified: 2013-07-02 23:04 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description contributor 2013-06-23 11:32:21 UTC 
Specification: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/tabular-data.html
Multipage: http://www.whatwg.org/C#the-table-element
Complete: http://www.whatwg.org/c#the-table-element
Referrer: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/

Comment:
Clarify the correct use of the <border> attribute. Validators (w3 and
validator.nu) consider it conforming and W3 specifications, in both versions 5
and 5.1WD, allow it "for non-presentational purposes", even if layout tables
aren't conforming.

Posted from: 84.220.42.192
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/27.0.1453.116 Safari/537.36
Comment 1 Michael[tm] Smith 2013-06-24 00:28:18 UTC 
(In reply to comment #0)
> Clarify the correct use of the <border> attribute.

In the WHATWG HTML spec the border attribute isn't a valid attribute for the table element at all, ever. There's nothing in the spec that makes that unclear.

> Validators (w3 and
> validator.nu) consider it conforming

The validators emit errors for it unless the value is "1" or the empty string.

> and W3 specifications, in both versions
> 5
> and 5.1WD, allow it "for non-presentational purposes", even if layout tables
> aren't conforming.

I don't know where that quote is from but I can't find "for non-presentational purposes" anywhere in the W3C specs.

The W3C specs say this:

http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html/master/tabular-data.html#attr-table-border
[[
The border attribute may be specified on a table element to explicitly indicate that the table element is not being used for layout purposes. If specified, the attribute's value must either be the empty string or the value "1".
]]

Anyway, there doesn't seem to be any bug to fix here in the WHATWG HTML spec. If you want a change made to the W3C specs you should file a separate bug:

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/enter_bug.cgi?product=HTML%20WG

Or if you want a validator change:

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/enter_bug.cgi?product=Validator%20(Nu)