Re: FONT tag

> Alright. I have read from many people that the HTML 3.0 draft is not
> accurate.

Um, it's a proposed standard, not a description. It's accuracy depends
only on how well it reflects the intentions of the authors, not how
close browsers written after it was released (like Navigator) come to
the spec. What you are referring to is adherence, and it's not widely
adhered to. Very few browser authors are paying more than lip service
to it, so it's usefullness for HTML authors is minimal.

> So there are a few tags I would like to know about. I want to
> know if these tags are generally going to be supported by the majority of
> browsers:

If by "majority of browser" you mean "majority of different browsers
available", the ansewr is probably "no, yes, no". If by "majority of
browsers" you mean "the majority of browsers in use", the answer is
yes.

>  2) <TABLES BORDER=x>
>     (Mosaic ignores the size of the border you specify. If you put 0 they
>      put a border anyway!)

The only valid value for the BORDER attribute of the HTML 3 TABLE tag
is BORDER. Since the only reason for putting in a BORDER attribute is
to turn borders on, assuming the author wanted a border when you see a
BORDER attribute with an invalid value is a reasonable error recovery
strategy. So much so that every implementation of HTML 3 tables I've
seen did exactly that.

The latest tables draft includes a BORDER attribute for backwards
compatability with deployed browsers. Which is why this one gets a
"yes".

The other two things you ask about are covered by the style sheet
mechanism, and aren't part of any proposed standard I know of, in any
shape. As such, they'll only show up in browsers that specifically
try and track netscape extensions. The browser I use regularly seem to
split about 50/50 on whether they are going to track Netscape or not.

Since there's no accurate specification of how the extensions behave,
don't be surprised if usage that works in the version of netscape you
are using now fails to work in a different but "compatable" browser -
like a later version of netscape.

	<mike

Received on Monday, 18 March 1996 13:50:12 UTC