HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide by Chuck Musciano & Bill Kennedy Unconfirmed error reports are from readers. They have not yet been approved or disproved by the author or editor and represent solely the opinion of the reader. This page was updated December 02, 2002. Here's a key to the markup: [page-number]: serious technical mistake {page-number}: minor technical mistake : important language/formatting problem (page-number): language change or minor formatting problem ?page-number?: reader question or request for clarification UNCONFIRMED errors and suggestions from readers: (xii) 1st paragraph, last line, "elipsis" should be "ellipsis" (8) Line 3 misspelling ("Exstensible"). (9) sec.1.4, line 1 "is one of many other markup languages" should be "is only one of many markup languages" since HTML is not in the set of things that aren't HTML! (10) p.10, 10th line from bottom) (Also p.34 ln 7, p.59, 7th line from bottom) "HTML and its progeny XHTML..." I've always thought, and was relieved to see that the Oxford English Dictionary agrees, that 'progeny' is always plural, meaning 'children' or 'descendants'. Apologies if the quote represents correct American English usage, but to protect British sensibilities could a phrase like "HTML and its offspring XHTML..." be substituted? Given the spirit of the book, I feel that nonstandard American or British extensions of English should be deprecated :-) (40) - Sect 3.2 code: ... This illustrates in a very simple way, ... You refer to this in Sect. 3.3 first paragraph (p 40), and Sect. 3.3.3 (p 42) as "simp" being a syllable. However, the syllables for "simple" is "sim" and "ple" not "simp" and "le". So code should be ... This illustrates in a very simple way, ... [48] 3rd paragraph: The authors recommend not using the tag for HTML documents. This is a bad idea for several reasons. First, it will trigger "quirks" or "quirky" mode in IE for Mac, Netscape 6, and all browsers built with Mozilla. See http://www.hut.fi/u/hsivonen/doctype.html for details. Additionally, documents without this tag will not pass through the W3C validator. Unvalidated documents have a high probability of containing the "tag soup" that has plagued the web. See http://web.oreilly.com/news/csstop10_0500.html for details. Last, and maybe least, documents without won't let iCab http://www.icab.de/smile.html smile! [48, 50] In the 3rd paragraph on page 48, the author states, "Almost no one precedes their HTML documents with the SGML doctype command. Because of the confusion of versions and standards, we don't recommend that you include the prefix with your HTML documents either." Further, on page 50, section 3.6.1.3, 2nd paragraph, the author states, "Serious authors should instead use an SGML tag at the beginning of their documents, like this:" I think the authors are a little confused...I am. (55) 2nd paragraph, 2nd sentence.; Comma after "Various browsers" is grammatically incorrect. (56) 2nd paragraph; The sections where the dir and lang attributes are addressed earlier in this chapter are 3.6.1.1 and 3.6.1.2, not 3.5.1.1 and 3.5.1.2. The references in the gray text are correct, however. [58] datetime attribute example; The example shows February 22, 1998 at 2:26 p.m. GMT. The equivalent Eastern Standard Time would be 9:26 a.m. (the sun rises earlier in Greenwich than New York) which should be coded 1998-02-22T09:26-05:00 rather than the 7:26 p.m. example in the book. (58) Section 3.9.1.3.; The title of this section refers to the event (or events) attributes twice. [64] 3rd paragraph; The id attribute has a number of restrictions on the characters that can go into it. For example it may not contain white space. The authors claim that it is any "quote- enclosed string". {80} last sentence before table: It would help greatly to explain that the standard entities are from the Latin-1 character set, and the non-standard ones are from the Windows ANSI character set. It would help even more to give a list of character set values that can be used with the charset attribute, and which OSes and which browsers support which character sets. (87) Section 4.5.10, last line "discernible" should be "discernable" (100) example code: This example is fairly humorous (as are many others in the book), and I've been a big fan of the O'Reilly books for their use of humor to lighten things up. In this case, however, I think a different example might be warranted. The last several years have seen an increase in the number of inexperienced Linux users. I suspect many of these are also running web servers. There is the potential, albeit a small one, that some newbie is going to execute this code (or a variant thereof) in the hope of improving performance. {101} Paragraph 4.7.3: can be used without the tags with both Netscape and Explorer. I used it to optionally break a large binary number. (105) Section 4.7.5: The align attribute is not explained for the

 tag.


(107) Section 4.7.6:
The align attribute is not explained for the  tag.


{112} last paragraph:

	Although not yet supported by the popular browsers... 

The  tag is already supported by Mozilla 0.8, Linux.


(119) Table of description of  tag. The second column of Attributes listed
is mis-aligned (ONMOUSEOUT, ONMOUSEOVER, and ONMOUSEUP are shifted to the
left).


(120)  sample for the size attribute;
"followed by a IE's 2-pixel tall rule line."
should read
"followed by IE's 2-pixel tall rule line."
to match the screen shot in figure 5-2.


[176] 4th paragraph:
It's not clear whether "Wild Wild Web" was meant to be humorous or whether it 
was a typographical error and should have been "World Wild Web".


[189] last sentence on page:

	To be compliant, with HTML 4 and XHTML standards, place 
	the  tag inside other markup tags, not the opposite.

I've created several XTHML pages that have, nested inside,  or  
tag sets and have successfully validated these pages using the STRICT DTD. I 
just looked at the W3C specifications for HTML 4.01 and XTHML 1.0 and could 
find no reference to a prohibiton on including other markup tags within the 
 tag set. Of course, nesting of links within links is prohibited and a 
well-formed document will be properly nested (i.e., without overlap).


[209]  Both  examples;
The coordinates given for the rectangle shape ("75,75,99,99") in both  examples
only cover the lowest-rightmost sixteenth of a 100 x 100 image (not the entire lower-
right quarter).

In the second example, the author asserts that clicking anywhere in the lower-left
quarter will display the "link4.html" document, when in fact nothing would happen
(since the example does not define an  with the coordinates of that quarter,
i.e. "0,50,50,99").


{219} It says the  element should work with a relative URL as the 
value of the href attribute.
At least in modern browsers (IE 5.5, IE 6, Netscape 6.2),
that does not appear to be the case.  The 
is ignored;  works.


[222] 6.7.2.5:
You suggest in this section that the link information may be used by browsers 
to provide "next, prev and parent links".  How can this work if there is only 
one title attribute?


[223]   tag Attributes list;
The attributes listed for the  tag includes "HTTP_EQUIV" (with an underbar).  I believe this should be "HTTP-EQUIV" (with a d
ash or hyphen).


{224} Paragraph 6.8.1.1: 
Search engines use two meta tags: “keywords” and “description”. 
The description is used as a brief description of your page. If it is left 
out, the search engine typically uses the first section of the text which may 
look garbled to the user of the search engine.


{235}  Last paragraph,  example;
The author introduces the code example as "rendered by Netscape," but the
corresponding figure (Figure 7-4) on page 236 shows the code example rendered in
Internet Explorer.


(235, 240) Section 7.3 states that there should be no text between  tags 
in a table. However, Section 7.5.1 encourages the use of the  tag between 
 tags for spacing purposes.


(236) XHTML example:
Because this example is XHTML, the value in the third 
 tag must have 
quotes around it, as in 
 instead of 
.


[239-240] Paragraph 7.5.1.1: 
Both Netscape and Explorer honor the compact attribute (since version 3). If 
left out, the  and 
 text is always placed on two lines. With the 
compact attribute the text is placed on a single line only if the 
 text 
fits in the space used for indention, which is for Explorer very small.


?240? Can you control the amount of indention using style sheets?


[249] Re Style Sheets:
There is no mention of the !important label or what effect user's settings of 
browser preferences have on author's style settings? Documentation in IE5 and 
Netscape 6 both say the user can override the browser's default settings and 
the autor's style sheet settings. I gather "!important" is not supported but 
is mentioned by W3C.


{253}  Code at top, 8.1.3.1;
The last line is :
" I am ba-loooooo, tooooo!
"
The last tag should be a 

The same thing applies too to page 251.


(260)  Fourth paragraph;
The author's introduction of the "contextual selectors" code example does not match
the actual example.


?261-2?  1st paragraph on page 262;
In section 8.2.4 that straddles page 261 and 262, I need some
clarification.  The paragraph that explains the examples states, "The second 
example selects a particular child/parent relationship, in this case items in 
an ordered list."

Exactly what relationship would that be?  This doesn't seem to be adequately 
explained.  Also, where do we find the rest of the patterns the section refers 
to? 


[270] 8.4.1.4, second paragraph:

	... the URL is relative to the immediate style sheet's 
	URL, the one in which it is declared.

On tests I've done for the background property, this is true for IE5.5 and for
Netscape 6 (PR3). It is not so, however, for Netscape 4.73 where the URL is 
interpreted as being relative to the html file being browsed.

Is this a bug in this particular version of Netscape, or is this so for all 
version 4 browsers?


{272} Paragraph 8.4.3.2: 
When the font-size property is set to an absolute value such as “font-size,
12pt” Explorer does not allow the user to control the displayed font-size 
anymore (Netscape will). To replace any  tags it is better to use
relative font sizes leaving the user in control of the actual size. The seven 
font sizes correspond to 60% (7.2pt), 83% (10pt), 100% (12pt), 112% (13.5pt), 
150% (18pt), 200% (24pt) and 300% (36pt) for Explorer. For Netscape, it is 
slightly different because 100% = 12.63pt: 63% (8pt), 79% (10pt), 95% (12pt), 
107% (13.5pt), 135%* (18pt), 190% (24pt), 285% (36pt).

* This is not a mistake, 143% is what I expect but Netscape renders this
bigger.


[275]  Second to last paragraph;
The author says that the preceeding rule for the  tag will display text "in the
boldest 24-point sans-serif font available."
There is nothing in the cooresponding rule to explicitly indicate bolding; is a value
missing (e.g. "900")?


{279}  Code example for "background-repeat";
The second line of the code example uses a keyword of "middle" which is not valid for
the background-position property


{284}  "text-shadow" code example;
In the rule for the h1 selector, "text-shadow;" should be "text-shadow:".


[294] end of section 8.4.6.11:
You say the padding property is supported in Netscape and not in IE. I find 
the opposite to be true, at least where I'm using it: a nested table, to 
create a hanging indent. 

Your demonstration of the hanging indent does not work inside tables in either
browser, but using {padding-left: .17in; text-indent: -.16in} does work in IE.
Using that combination in Netscape, the text-indent has an effect, but the 
padding-left doesn't.


{295} 1st paragraph:

	percentage values compute the wide to be a percentage of 
	the width of the containing element. For example:

  		img (width: 100px)

The example is not showing "percentage" width.




[300]  3rd paragraph;
The first sentence of the third paragraph states:

"Although deprecated, the  tag also supports the standard tag attributes."

The span tag is not deprecated.  Perhaps you meant this:

"The  tag also supports the deprecated standard tag attributes."



(310)  first paragraph;

"The browser may chose ..."

should read:

"The browser may choose ..."


{314}  Figure 9-1;
Figure 9-1 has a submit button that reads "Submit Query," but the  tag in the
code above does not have the "value='Submit Query'" verbiage that would make this
possible.  The code, as presented, would create a button that simply says "submit."


{317}  Last line of Table 9-1;
The  form element is not listed as supporting the "readonly" 
attribute in table 9-1 (A matrix of form elements vs. supported 
attributes). However, both the template description box at the end of 
9.7.1.1 (at the top of p.332) and also empirical testing with Netscape 6.1b 
indicate that the attribute IS optionally supported.


[324]  5th paragraph; last sentence (in parentheses);
"(Use checkboxes for on/off, yes/no types of form controls.)"

Don't you mean radio buttons?


[324]  First paragraph;
The last sentence of the first paragraph reads (referring to radio button elements):
"If no element in the group is checked, the browser automatically checks the first
element in the group."

This was true under HTML 2.0, but not anymore. According to the HTML 4.01
specification, "[i]f no radio button in a set sharing the same control name is
initially "on", user agent behavior for choosing which control is initially "on" is
undefined."

(http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#radio)

IE 5.5, for one, leaves the field blank if no radio button is selected when a form is
submitted.


(348)  Last paragraph;
"The align attributes in the table cells force the labels to the left and the
elements to the right..."

The corresponding code example and rendering show the labels aligned right and
elements aligned left.


{360}  10.2.1.2 bgcolor and background attributes (TABLE tag);
BGCOLOR is deprecated for TABLE tags but this fact is not mentioned.

The section discussing the bgcolor attribute of the table tag fails to mention 
that is deprecated per the HTML4.0 std. This _is_ noted in the BODY tag description, 
but not in the TABLE, TR, not TD tag information.

Overall you do a good job noting deprecated markup, but thought this should be 
specifically noted here as well. 

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/present/graphics.html#adef-bgcolor


{361}  Line 5;
'With XHTML, use border="border"' should be
'With XHTML, use border="0"'.


{362} In section 10.2.1.7 and on page 577, paragraph 8: 
both do not indicate that the cellpadding for the table tag can be either an 
integer in pixels OR a % of the available space!


[375]  3rd and 4th paragraphs;
The headers attribute is a list of ids (IDREFS in xml).  The authors do not state
that it is a white-space separated list, as opposed to, say, comma separated.

IDREFS is also not defined sufficiently to answer this question in the XML chapter.

{406} In section 11.6.1.1 the values for the align attribute are top, middle, 
bottom, left, or right. The HTML 4.01 standard says left, center, right, 
justify. I have no idea which are correct.


[407]  2nd example;
should

<frame src="pref.html" id="view_frame">

actually be

<frame src="pref.html" name="view_frame">

?


[408] 11.7.2, explanation of "_parent":
A _parent target does not cause a document to be loaded into a frameset, 
unless that frameset as a whole is defined within a document that is itself a 
frame within a frameset.  In that case, the new document is loaded into the 
frame in which the frameset-defining document was loaded.  If a _parent target
is used otherwise, it works just like _top. 

In the example stated at the top of p.409 and shown in Figure 11-9, a 
reference to _parent would act the same as a reference to _top. It works when 
the three-column frameset is defined within a seperate document, which in its 
turn is loaded in a row of the "top-level" frameset. (The obvious solution 
would be to have named framesets, but apparently nobody ever considered this.)
Tested in MSIE 5.5 and below; NS 4.7 and below.


416 Section 12.2., 2nd paragraph, next to last line:

     ("helper")

consistency of quotation marks with p. 417, Section 12.2.1. The <object> Tag,
last line of the page:

     (helper)


{437} list:
<frameset> is listed as "do not accept these event attributes". frameset 
accepts onLoad and onUnload and maybe onFocus and onBlur. Also, tags that are 
extensions were not listed?



(510)  2nd indented example;
close-quote is in the wrong place, destroying the </div> tag and giving an unlikely
name to the namespace:

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML>x2/x</div">

should probably be

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML">x2/x</div>

{547} label_tag

</form> should be </label> 


(489) 1st paragraph of Understanding XML DTDs:
"syntactic sugar" is used incorrectly. The authors mean the DTD is hard for a 
human to read, but syntactic sugar means "Features added to a language or 
other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans" (see 
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/s/syntactic_sugar.html). Possibly the 
authors mean "syntactic salt" -- this is closer but really not right, either.


[521]  17.1 Top of the Tips;
The "Top of the Tips" should be to validate your HTML and XHTML code (all 
your code all the time, not just when you notice a problem!), as Eric Meyer 
explains in his CSS tips http://web.oreilly.com/news/csstop10_0500.html

Invalid HTML is the #1 problem with websites that don't work, and it's far 
easier and more effective than trying to test your web pages with all 
versions of all browsers.


(544) content_style appears to be missing the <samp> tag.


(546) head_content appears to be missing the <object> and <script> tags.


{579}  readonly attribute of the textarea tag;
It appears that the readonly attribute of the textarea tag is only supported by IE.  I tried the attribute in Netscape 4.74 as well as Netscape 6.0 and the browser seemed to ignore the readonly attribute.  Also, affects page 332 textarea chart;

How about putting an "IE" icon next to this attribute (readonly) of the textarea tag?


[582] The "owl" text:
It is not clear where the "compliance document" is. If you follow the link as 
suggested, there is no indication (or link) to find the "compliance document".
If you follow the CSS quick reference link in reinterates, the text in the 
book links you back to the original page, catalog/html4/.


(588)  bottom of the page under "text-transform";
Under "text-transform" at the bottom of page 588, it lists the page number in Chapter 8 that 
talks about this as "8.5.4.7"

This should be changed to "8.5.4.9" (change the 7 to a 9)

In chapter 8 on page 286 you will see that 8.5.4.9 refers to "The text-transform" property


[628]  € ƒ;
The conformance column could replace most !!! by the appropriate entity,
e.g. ƒ for ƒ etc. upto Ÿ for Ÿ  For european users
adding € and € is interesting.  For more test results compare
http://frank.ellermann.bei.t-online.de/ibm850.htm (with a link to a
site showing named entities for anything in the "Windows Glyph Set 4",
IIRC (e.g. &house; corresponding to the old 0x7F glyph on PCs).


{629}  Character Entities table;
There are some incorrect and missing entries in the Character Entites table:
€ Euro sign
‹ Left single angle quote
˜ Small tilde
› Right single angle quote


(631) Ð:
The symbol looks like a capital OE ligature, not like a capital Eth character.
(This was correct in the 3rd edition.)


{633}  Color Values Section;
The section on color values neglects to mention that web-safe colors have a 
short name that is only a three-digit hexadecimal number. For example, 
white is #FFF and light green is #0F0.


{634-5}  Extended Color Names list;
The colors lightgoldenrod, lightslateblue, navyblue, and violetred are not recognized
by IE or Netscape.


INDEX:

(644) "<font> tags":
The index entry for "<font> tags" should include the page range 92-95, which 
is the section that describes the <font> tag.


(645) Frameset DTD:
This entry refers to appendix E (XHTML), why not also to appendix D (HTML), 
page 590?


(655) Strict DTD:
This entry refers to appendix E (XHTML), why not also to appendix D (HTML), 
page 590?


(657) Transitional DTD:
This entry refers to appendix E (XHTML), why not also to appendix D (HTML), 
page 590?


(back cover) 1st paragraph:
"Netscape Navigator 6.0" should be changed to "Netscape 6," as it was changed 
on page 235.


[QR]  Quick Reference;
It would help tremendously to indicate which tags and attributes are 
deprecated in HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0, transitional or strict DTDs, and 
which tags and attributes are browser-specific!

I am ba-loooooo, tooooo!

" The last tag should be a