Giant Geek Blog

No, you are not going crazy… MSIE 6 and 7 are case sensitive for the ‘frameBorder‘ (and a few other attributes).
It seems that the JavaScript attribute names are expected to be used in the HTML, should you expect them to behave and look properly you’ll have to make some small changes to support, this is even more important when using JavaScript to update or change attributes.

<iframe... frameBorder="0"></iframe>

The only built-in entities in XML are &, <, >, " and ' XHTML added the others via a DTD that is not a part of HTML5. As such, validators will report them as errors.

Safe replacements are the decimal notation:   or the character itself U+00A0;

Quite a few other common symbols are not available without similar changes.

• < = <
• > = >
• & = &
• ' = '
• " = "
•   –  
• © = ©
• ® = ®
• ™ = ™

REFERENCES:

XHTML tags in the format <tag />.

<br />, <hr />, <img />, <input />, <base />, <link />

The space before closing slash was primarily done for legacy browsers that did not properly parse the value without an attribute or space, but does have some value in improving readability of XHTML markup. (In my experience this is NN4.x and earlier.)

Per http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_2:

C.2. Empty Elements

Include a space before the trailing / and > of empty elements, e.g. <br />, <hr /> and <img src="karen.jpg" alt="Karen" />. Also, use the minimized tag syntax for empty elements, e.g. <br />, as the alternative syntax <br /> allowed by XML gives uncertain results in many existing user agents.

REFERENCE:

Ideally all JavaScript and CSS definitions should be external to the content of an HTML page, in some cases it’s simply not practical. If you’ve migrated to XHTML markup of your page, this can often lead to XML validation errors. The use of a CDATA escape can fix most issues, though you may have to cleanup some of the actual code to resolve other issues, particularly with some special characters that are expected to be encoded.

Here are a few examples of CDATA implementation in HTML tags:

<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
...
/* ]]> */
</script>

<style type="text/css">
/* <![CDATA[ */
...
/* ]]> */
</style>


As I often find myself cleaning up legacy webapp codebases, this item seems pretty common, particularly for sites that were using TABLE based layouts.


<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<thead>
<tr><th>Hello</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>World</td></tr>
</tbody>


With modern browsers, this is easily accomplished with some simple CSS, as you might need some distinction between different tables or have some cases that require padding or spacing, you MIGHT consider assigning a CSS class as I have below.


<style type="text/css">
table.modern{
border-collapse: collapse; /* 'cellspacing=0' equivalent */
}
table.modern td,
table.modern th{
padding: 0; /* 'cellpadding=0' equivalent */
}
</style>

<table class="modern">
<thead>
<tr><th>Hello</th></tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr><td>World</td></tr>
</tbody>


I’ve found that many developers still use the classic coding style on JSP’s, unfortunately this makes it difficult to use some common tools for validation and complicates matters when looking for improperly nested tags in the markup. Migrating the XML formatted JSP markup simplifies matters and makes it possible for developers to quickly identify many problem areas of code within the IDE.

<%@ page language="java" %> = <jsp:page.directive language="java" />

<%@ page import="" %> = <jsp:page.directive import="" />

NOTE: you can combine page.directive’s to a single tag with all attributes.

<% //some scriptlet %> = <jsp:scriptlet>//some scriptlet</jsp:scriptlet>

<jsp:setProperty name="" />


Unfortunately, there’s one common type of tag that does not have an XML equivalent:

<%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="/WEB-INF/tlds/c.tld" %>


REFERENCES:

Happy coding

CSS = Cascading Style Sheets, this is done primarily to externalize the ‘look and feel’ of a web page from the actual ‘data’ being presented.

There are several ways to do this…
1. External file (most common)… add the following to the <head> section of your page:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/filename.css" media="all" />

2. Inline (usually in the <head> section of every page):

<style type="text/css" media="screen">
<!--
... // some stuff here.
-->
</style>

3. Inline (on individual tags):

<div style="color:red;">Red text</div>

NOTES:
1. Media types (common – though others exist!):
* screen
* print
* all

2. Guideline: always use lowercase names in your CSS, MUST start with an alpha (not numeric).

I’m skotfred, aka ‘Giant Geek’, developer of (predominantly web-based) applications. Primary development done with JSP/Java, PHP, XHTML/CSS/JavaScript. Previous applications in VisualBASIC, C/C++, Perl, COBOL/CICS, BASIC (various), Assember (PC & MVS), and Pascal.

Standards ARE everything, particularly when building for multiple platforms… look for more ramblings soon!