tee skrev:
Perhaps it will help the web standards if W3C to be more authoritative
and dictatorial?
"MUST NOT", "MUST", "ABSOLUTELY NOT", "ILLEGAL TO USE", "NOT ALLOWED"
to replace these ambiguous "MAY NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT".
If one reads the specs these words are not ambiguous. W3C uses these
words according to RFC2119: http://rfc.net/rfc2119.html (While typing
this message I see that Thomas Thomassen already has referred to this RFC.)
What is ambiguous is that some older specs do not provide enough detail.
HTML 4.01 only works since browsers emulate each other.
As for fieldsets outside of forms we have a grey area. No spec says they
are allowed or disallowed. There are simply no "SHOULD" or "SHOULD
NOT", "MAY" or "MAY NOT" phrases to guide us.
That means - in spec language - that there is no prohibition. The only
place where we have any indication is the DTD. Which says it is allowed.
One could counter that argument by saying that this is a limitation of
the DTD-language as such. The people who made the DTD cut a few corners
to not make it too burdensome. However, putting FIELDSET outside of
<!ENTITY % %block
"P | %heading; | %list; | %preformatted; | DL | DIV | NOSCRIPT |
BLOCKQUOTE | FORM | HR | TABLE | FIELDSET | ADDRESS">
would not be rocket science. It is doable. All it would take is to
change this line:
<!ELEMENT FORM - - (%block;|SCRIPT)+ -(FORM) -- interactive form -->
Into this:
<!ELEMENT FORM - - (%block;|FIELDSET|SCRIPT)+ -(FORM) -- interactive
form -->
Ergo: The only reasonable conclusion is that the spec writers did not
intend to forbid the usage of fieldsets outside of forms.
Which leaves with the question if it is wise, i.e. good practice.
Perhaps also the letter of the law vs. the spirit of the law.
However, the comparison that was made with using tables for layout does
not make sense. I also note that no one is quoting any research showing
any negative effects.
Keryx's point of view seems to be dominant, I fear. Even the teacher
at my web design class seems to think that using EMs to style citations
is valid. Yet she generally encourages web standards... :(
There is a difference. EM has clear implications for screen readers and
othe UAs, and there are already elements available that has been made
for quotations: <q> and <blockquote>.
Once again the comparison is wrong. The two cases are not analogous.
What I want is more like a div with a caption, for which there is no
predefined markup. In HTML 5 I would perhaps use <aside>, but still have
no way of specifying a caption. Unless HTML 5 explicitly allows the use
of fieldsets outside of forms, or captions outside of tables (or invents
some new markup), and specifically defines how the parsing algorithm
should look like and how the information should be made available to the
user by the UA.
Lars Gunther
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