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Bug 24641 - Consider making border a boolean attribute
Summary: Consider making border a boolean attribute
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: PC All
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: This bug has no owner yet - up for the taking
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/drafts/html...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on: 24636
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2014-02-13 00:56 UTC by Leif Halvard Silli
Modified: 2014-02-28 16:29 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:


Attachments

Description Leif Halvard Silli 2014-02-13 00:56:43 UTC
Because all of the following variants of table@border cause table cells to be rendered with 1px borders, it would be simpler to authors if the element became a boolean attribute.

  border=""
  border="1"
  border="not-a-number"

The rendering rules did not have to change. Only the authoring rules.

To avoid useless error messages, border=1 could perhaps be made ”obsolete but conforming”.

Thus, consequently, border="" and border="border" would become the conforming values.

The following regime, were border=1 is fully conforming, might be interpreted by authors as if border= can take any number as value. Whereas in reality, border is just a on-off signal.
Comment 1 Robin Berjon 2014-02-13 11:06:01 UTC
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If
you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please
reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML
Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest
title and text for the Tracker Issue; or you may create a Tracker Issue
yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:

   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: none
Rationale: As per bug 24591 we are moving towards making border non-conforming. There is absolutely no value in making border a boolean attribute given that its only use is presentational. Using border as an indicator that a table is not presentational is not a sensible heuristic for the specification: that's the default value anyway.
Comment 2 Leif Halvard Silli 2014-02-13 12:28:54 UTC
(In reply to Robin Berjon from comment #1)


> Status: Rejected
> Change Description: none
> Rationale: As per bug 24591 we are moving towards making border
> non-conforming. There is absolutely no value in making border a boolean
> attribute given that its only use is presentational. Using border as an
> indicator that a table is not presentational is not a sensible heuristic for
> the specification: that's the default value anyway.

As per the my comments in bug 24591, including reference to a HTML WG decision, it does not make sense to keep border out of the list of permitted attributes.
Comment 3 Robin Berjon 2014-02-28 16:29:01 UTC
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are
satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If
you have additional information and would like the Editor to reconsider, please
reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML
Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest
title and text for the Tracker Issue; or you may create a Tracker Issue
yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document:

   http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html

Status: Rejected
Change Description: none
Rationale:

If it is a genuinely a good idea to use the @border attribute to indicate that a table is non-presentational, since the expectation is that table should never be presentational, then the only logical choice would be to make table elements that do not feature the @border attribute non-conforming.

Arguing for a heuristic based on what is de facto an obsolete feature is one thing; changing said heuristic is another. Authors who wish to flag their non-presentational table as non-presentational are already wasting 10 characters; it does not seem particularly useful to help them save 3 of those.