Forms in table cells modify cell height - grrr

[Bergamot]

Even in terms of rendering, you mean?

Just look what happens in different browsers when the alt attribute is
omitted from <img>, and images aren't loaded for some reason.

 

[Tim Streater]

Scripsit Tim Streater:


There's some confusion here. In a <form> element, the method="..." attribute
is and always was optional, with the default value being "GET". The
action="..." attribute is required, and it has been required ever since HTML
4.0.


Well, the same _page_. In HTML 3.2, the action="..." attribute was optional,
with the default value being the URL of the page on which the form appears.
Browsers might still behave that way, but it's not a good idea to use
invalid markup and to rely on behavior that is holdover from some previous
version.

Right. If that's invalid then I'll certainly add it.

You might want that, but can you do that reliably?


There is no such option. By HTML versions from HTML 4.0 onwards, the meaning
of a form element is undefined unless it has an action attribute with a http
URL.
OK.

If a form exists only for the purpose of JavaScript-based interaction, then
the form, and perhaps the entire page, should be JavaScript-generated so
that it does not appear when it does not work. Even then, a conforming
action="..." attribute _is_ useful. It's a sentinel against errors that may
arise when the form is, after all, used in a browser where scripting is not
enabled. (For example, a page might be generated by JavaScript code but the
user might then disable scripting. To take a less far-fetched example, an
author might just goof things up and e.g. omit the JavaScript code that
prevents normal form submission.)

The sentinel attribute could be action="error.html" where error.html is a
document that explains that an unexpected error occurred. You might write a
longer explanation if you like, but most users probably wouldn't understand
it. What matters is that users are informed about an error, instead of just
weird behavior or everything going well on the surface while everything is
broken.

Well, I can tell them to contact me, although they know to do that
anyway. The user base is our engineers, our NOC's engineers, and some of
our customers' engineers. They all know who I am.

Posting a URL is still the best approach in HTML problems. If you don't have
a URL, create one. It doesn't take that long to compose a valid document and
upload it on a server.

Right, I'll bear that in mind.

 

[dorayme]

Just look what happens in different browsers when the alt attribute is
omitted from <img>, and images aren't loaded for some reason.

This might illustrate some of the differences:

http://tinyurl.com/34z6kf