One of the tasks I have been doing for my project is to make a web site XHTML strict compliant. Well, the site was designed ages ago when it was probably still HTML 3.2 time. There used to have no DTD and the browsers rendered the site just fine. Now by just adding that one line of DTD declaring all pages to the XHMTL strict, we are doomed. None of the pages could be validated. *sigh.

Among everything we had attributes that are no longer supported in HTML 4.01, such as “target” attribute in <a href> tag, and attribute “name” in <form> tag. But almost all forms use “name” attribute! And inline+external JavaScripts depend on that!! Oh lord…

Luckily help is always somewhere online if one is willing to dig and dig and dig. I followed this tutorial by Kevin Yank to resolve all <a target> issues. Apparently that solution was out there for ages; I just didn’t know. =) That was nice and easy. <form name> issue was resolved by substituting “name” to “id”. I just had to remember all references to it in JavaScript.

One that that tripped me was the <tfoot> tag. The pages had a lot of data presented in tables. <tfoot> was introduced when we separated CSS from all pages. But browser validation always complains about it. It looked right to me. =\ I dig deeper into the World Wide Web begging for some clue. Eventually I found out that <tfoot> has to be declared before <tbody>. So the order should be <table><thead></thead><tfoot></tfoot><tbody></tbody></table>. What dah? It still doesn’t make sense to me. But oh well, as long as it validates…