Re: LYNX-DEV tables within forms (again)

[David Woolley]

"non alphabetic characters", some more explanations; tables within forms
are legal.

Phillip Webb wrote:
> 
> 970917 Christine Anderson wrote (abbreviated):
> >  
> > The programmer at Cuadra thinks that Lynx may be having trouble
> > with the non-alphabetic characters.  Is this the case?

Where were the non-alphabetic characters used?  Any compliant browser will
have problems with characters which are outside the declared character
set; it is quite common to find CP 437 and CP 1252 only characters in 
document explicitly or implicitly declared to be ISO 8859/1.  Many
Windows browsers ignore the character set and display whatever matches
in the current font.  Unless an alternative character set is declared,
the only legal characters in HTML 3.2 are those with internal codes
(popularly, but incorrectly called ASCII values) between 32 and 126 and
between 160 and 255.  Tab (9) is questionable, and CR (13) and LF (10)
can be used to mark line ends.

Unicode entities are allowed in 4.0, and possibly 3.2, but there are no
Unicode values below 256 except as above.

Note that some screen handling libraries, which may be used with Lynx,
and some terminals can't handle the full ISO 8859/1 set, but Lynx can be
configured to approximate them with pure ASCII (32 to 126).  Lynx 2.7
doesn't appear to know about CP 1252, but I suspect that 2.7.1 does.
CP 1252 is the Windows character set, at least in North America/Western
Europe, and is superset of ASCII/ISO 8859-1.

Common invalid characters are  (Code page 437 smiley face) and 
the forward and backward double quotes in CP 1252 (somewhere around
‘).

> that they contain tables within forms, which is incorrect HTML;

There is no such restriction in the HTML 3.2 DTD, nor, as far as I can
tell, in the draft HTML 4.0 one.  The spec for HTML 3.2 forms is 
%body.content -(FORM).  The spec for HTML 4.0 draft is %block -(FORM).
Lynx 2.5 (Linux) and 2.7.1 (Win32) show no signs of distress in handling
tables within forms.  Even if they were illegal, it would be a lost cause
trying to correct pages, as they are just too attractive to people using
HTML for page layout.

However it is still almost certain the HTML is broken (I tend to only
go online for short times, so it is difficult to verify other people's
HTML problems).

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