At 6/5/2007 05:54 AM, Nick Fitzsimons wrote:
It's only valid "by the DTD" in the sense that the DTD is incapable
of expressing all the constraints imposed upon the usage of HTML
elements; those constraints are made explicit in the spec by such
means as the sentence you originally quoted.
Hi Nick,
I agree with most of the arguments for restricting FIELDSET to forms,
including that the positioning of FIELDSET on the FORMS page of the
spec appears to make the intended context of its usage quite clear.
However, the DTD itself -- that rigid spine of the HTML spec -- is
certainly capable of expressing descendant constraints. In this case
it does not require that a FIELDSET contain any input controls at
all, as I read it. Here's what it stipulates for HTML 4.01 Strict:
<!ELEMENT FIELDSET - - (#PCDATA,LEGEND,(%flow;)*) -- form control group -->
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/dtd.html
...which I believe says that it must contain %PCDATA (character data)
followed by LEGEND followed by optional %flow. %flow can be %block
and/or %inline which leaves the list of descendants wide
open. LEGEND in turn must contain (%inline;)* -- zero or more inline
elements -- therefore none of FIELDSET's descendants must contain an
input control.
The FIELDSET definition could easily have included:
(INPUT|SELECT|TEXTAREA|BUTTON)+
or:
(%formctrl)+
But it doesn't. The English language comment in the DTD says "form
control group" but the SGML syntax itself explicitly permits a
FIELDSET group to contain no input controls at all.
We can speculate on the reasons for this presumably deliberate lack
of specificity -- perhaps the DTD engineers were leaving room for us
to markup "display versions" of input forms, for example -- but we
cannot argue that the DTD omitted this because it was incapable of
expressing such contraints.
To confirm my interpretation of the DTD I referred to:
On SGML and HTML
http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/intro/sgmltut.html
Regards,
Paul
__________________________
Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com
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