ALIGN attribute not deprecated in TD tag ??

[Stan Brown]

In converting my pages to 4.01 Strict, I've been removing ALIGN
attributes everywhere. I was surprised to notice that a page that
validated contained a <td align=left>.

Sure enough, when I checked at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/attributes.html
I found that while ALIGN is deprecated as an attribute for TABLE, it
is still a full-fledged pukka attribute for subelements of TABLE:
TBODY THEAD, TD, TH, etc.

Anyone know why? Was this a political decision, out of concerns that
too many people use the ALIGN attribute on those tags? Or is there
some technical reason why ALIGN was deprecated on most tags but not
all?

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Headless]

Stan Brown <th************@fastmail.fm> wrote:

In converting my pages to 4.01 Strict, I've been removing ALIGN
attributes everywhere. I was surprised to notice that a page that
validated contained a <td align=left>.

Sure enough, when I checked at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/attributes.html
I found that while ALIGN is deprecated as an attribute for TABLE, it
is still a full-fledged pukka attribute for subelements of TABLE:
TBODY THEAD, TD, TH, etc.

Anyone know why? Was this a political decision, out of concerns that
too many people use the ALIGN attribute on those tags? Or is there
some technical reason why ALIGN was deprecated on most tags but not
all?

Practically all presentational table attributes were left in place
(width, cellpadding, cellspacing, border etc.), a cop out imo.
Headless

--
Email and usenet filter list: http://www.headless.dna.ie/usenet.htm

[Keith Bowes]

Stan Brown wrote:

In converting my pages to 4.01 Strict, I've been removing ALIGN
attributes everywhere. I was surprised to notice that a page that
validated contained a <td align=left>.

Sure enough, when I checked at
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/index/attributes.html
I found that while ALIGN is deprecated as an attribute for TABLE, it
is still a full-fledged pukka attribute for subelements of TABLE:
TBODY THEAD, TD, TH, etc.

Anyone know why? Was this a political decision, out of concerns that
too many people use the ALIGN attribute on those tags? Or is there
some technical reason why ALIGN was deprecated on most tags but not
all?

Because you do something like the following:
<td align="char" char=".">

That will align everything around the period character. Maybe "align"
was the wrong thing to name it because it suggests presentation, but it
is (theoretically, of course) an aide. Maybe something like
axis-char="." would have been more structural.

[Stan Brown]

In article <fB*************@fe01.atl2.webusenet.com> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Keith Bowes <do****@spam.me>
wrote:

Because you do something like the following:
<td align="char" char=".">

That will align everything around the period character. Maybe "align"
was the wrong thing to name it because it suggests presentation, but it
is (theoretically, of course) an aide. Maybe something like
axis-char="." would have been more structural.

I'm afraid I don't understand the point you're making. CSS lets you
align on a particular character, so that _could_ have been
deprecated in HTML4, but it wasn't. That's what I was asking: why
not?

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cortland County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator: http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
validator: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

[Keith Bowes]

Stan Brown wrote:

In article <fB*************@fe01.atl2.webusenet.com> in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html, Keith Bowes <do****@spam.me>
wrote:

Because you do something like the following:
<td align="char" char=".">

That will align everything around the period character. Maybe "align"
was the wrong thing to name it because it suggests presentation, but it
is (theoretically, of course) an aide. Maybe something like
axis-char="." would have been more structural.

I'm afraid I don't understand the point you're making. CSS lets you
align on a particular character, so that _could_ have been
deprecated in HTML4, but it wasn't. That's what I was asking: why
not?

Hmm. I thought that was the reason some W3C person gave me once: that
when HTML 4.0 came out in 1997, the CSS2 spec was still a working draft
and so the presentational attributes for tables were kept, but I guess
I'm mistaken. So, I guess the only possible reason left is: because the
W3C used tables for their home page's layout. :)