Archives for Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
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WTF is the Start-Attribute Deprecated?
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
I make sure my markup is always 100% valid XHTML 1.0 strict. I hate it when my little Tidy-icon isn't green and happy but yellow, or even worse, red from use of invalid or deprecated elements or attributes.
I recently added pagination to most of my sub-content widgets which you may have noticed, but it doesn't make much sense that the first article in the list of top rated articles on page 2 has the number 1 in front of it. Here's where the start-attribute comes in.
The start-attribute allows you to specify at what number an ordered list should start. This is exactly what I need in this situation but for some fooked up reason the start-attribute is no longer valid in strict doctypes.
I decided to ignore the fact that it is not valid XHTML 1 strict and use it anyway. I only use it in the case where the list doesn't start at 1 (so you'll never see a start="1" in the code) which means the first page is still error-free. But should you navigate to page 2 of any sub-content widget with javascript disabled you will experience invalid (X)HTML. I say with javascript disabled, because if you have js enabled that content is fetched with ajax and inserted with js so your validator won't notice the invalidity of the code.
I've read that instead of the start-attribute you're meant to use CSS-counters. I've only played around with them once before and for the #top-rated-articles ol to be different from page to page I would have to add a class specifying which page the list is on. Why is that better than a real attribute that does exactly that? And what about user-agents that don't support CSS? Should they not get the same information? Of course they should.
- Comments are off
- Filed under (X)HTML, Semantics, Web Standards
