G'day
<table summary="testing the attributes!" width="600" cellspacing="0"...
cellpadding="5" border="1" rules="cols" frame="hsides" >
and it is perfectly valid XHTML strict!
So there you go! Border? frame? rules? All presentational at the end of the day, surely . . .
It would appear that these attributes (which are presentational to me as well) will no longer be available in XHTML2:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/ http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/attributes.html
I don't see a need for most of these attributes any more, since the same can be achieved with CSS and they don't appear to have semantic meaning. Perhaps they were left in there because table rendering is a nightmare, with inconsistent browser support, especially for the col element, which is an oddity.
Still. Why use <td align="right"> when <td class="price"> can be used? Or <td align="center"> instead of <td class="qty">?
Border, frame, rules, cellpadding and the like can also be done with CSS (better in Firefox and Opera than in MSIE, because MSIE does not support the CSS "border-spacing").
The bottom line for me is... If it can be done with CSS, use CSS. If it can't be done reliably and the lack of browser support is a critical issue, use (still valid) Strict attributes in minimal quantities.
Regards -- Bert Doorn, Better Web Design http://www.betterwebdesign.com.au/ Fast-loading, user-friendly websites
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