HTML transitional vs strict

[BessieBee]

I'd appreciate it if someone could point me to info, preferably
online, about the differences between HTML transitional and strict.

I do a lot of my coding by hand and use the doc type 4.01
transitional.

What are the arguments for using one over the other? and, what changes
in coding are necessary to make the change from transitional to
strict?

Thanks!

 

[David Dorward]

I'd appreciate it if someone could point me to info, preferably
online, about the differences between HTML transitional and strict.

In a nutshell "Transitional is Strict with a bunch of legacy stuff (that you
should avoid) left in."

what changes in coding are necessary to make the change from
transitional to strict?

Generally speaking:

* Move inline content and character data that are children of the body
element or form elements into block containers which allow inline content.

* Stop using the elements and attribuates marked with L or F in the DTD
column of the lists of elements and attributes in the HTML specification.
http://w3.org/TR/html4/

 

[Harlan Messinger]

* Stop using the elements and attribuates marked with L or F in the DTD
column of the lists of elements and attributes in the HTML specification.
http://w3.org/TR/html4/

You know, you'd think that these people who try really hard to create a
specification, a task that calls for consistency in use of terminology
and presentation, would have settled on either "transitional" or "loose"
to describe the alternative to "strict". When you wrote "L" just now I
thought: "What?" So I went to look at the table and found "L" = "loose",
which I then remembered is the name of the file containing the
transitional DTD: loose.dtd. I mean, honestly, where were their heads?
But that name is going to be opaque to many people (who for the most
part don't write DTD declarations from scratch, word by word; they just
copy the whole thing and paste it without reading it), so it's even more
obscure for them to have used "L" instead of "T" in these tables to
which you referred.

 

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

You know, you'd think that these people who try really hard to create
a specification, a task that calls for consistency in use of
terminology and presentation, would have settled on either
"transitional" or "loose" to describe the alternative to "strict".

And you might also think that they'd decide to use that term also to
express their dislike for those features, instead of using a difficult
word like "depricitated" sorry "deprectade" I mean "depreciated" or
something like that.

I wonder whether their policy would have been more successful if they
had applied positive thinking. Instead of "Strict" (what a restrictive
word!) and "Loose" and "Transitional" and "Deprecated", they could have
just defined _the_ HTML language and then declared some elements,
attributes, and structures as "cool" or "very cool".

So e.g. <title> and <h1> would be very cool, and <p> for real paragraphs
(and only for them) would be cool, and so would <table> with <caption>
and <thead> and tabular data inside it, whereas <font> would be... well,
just not cool. And we would have, say, Vulgar, Cool, and VeryCool DTD.