This section describes how the 24 April 1998 version of the HTML 4.0
specification differs from the 18 December 1997 version.
A.2.1 Errors that were corrected
- Section 2.1.1
- "http://www.w3.org/TR/PR-html4/cover.html" was said to designate the
current HTML specification. The current HTML specification is actually at
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40.
- Section 7.5.2
- The hypertext link on name was incorrect. It now
links to types.html#type-name.
- Section 7.5.4
- href was listed as an attribute of the
DIV and
SPAN elements. It is not.
- Section 7.5.6
- A
P element was used in the example. It is invalid in
ADDRESS.
- Section 8.1
- In the first example, which reads "Her super-powers were the result...",
there was an extra double quote mark before the word "Her".
- Section 9.3.4
- The attribute width was not noted as
deprecated.
- Section 11.2.4, "Calculating the
width of columns"
- The sentence "We have set the value of the align attribute in the third
column group to 'center'" read "second" instead of "third".
- Section 11.2.6, "Cells that span
several rows or columns"
- The second paragraph read "In this table definition, we specify that the
cell in row four, column two should span a total of three columns, including
the current row." It now ends "...including the current column."
- Section 13.2
- The sentence beginning "User agents must render alternate text when they
cannot support ..." read "next", instead of "text".
- Section 13.6.2
- The last sentence of the second paragraph applied to both the
IMG and
INPUT elements. However, the
ismap attribute is not defined for
INPUT. The sentence now only applies to
IMG.
- Section 14.2.3
- The title attribute for the
STYLE element was not listed as an attribute defined elsewhere.
- Section 14.3.2
- The second example set title="Compact". It now sets
title="compact".
- Section 15.1.2
- The sentence ending "the align attribute." read "the
align element."
- Section 15.1.3.2
- The CSS style rule "BR.mybr { clear: left }" was incorrect, since it refers
to the class "mybr" and not the id value. The correct syntax is: "BR#mybr {
clear: left }".
- Section 16
- All the examples containing a Document Type Declaration used something like
"THE_LATEST_VERSION_/frameset.dtd" or "THE_LATEST_VERSION_" as the system
identifier for the Frameset DTD. They now use the proper document type
declaration indicated in Section
7.2
- Section 16.3 and Section 16.3.1
- The second example of 16.3 and the example of 16.3.1 used the wrong DTD;
they now use the Transitional DTD.
- Section 17.5
- In "attributes defined elsewhere" for the
BUTTON element, id,
class,
lang, dir,
title,
style, and
tabindex were missing. Also,
usemap has been removed.
- Section 17.6/17.6.1
- The "attributes defined elsewhere" for
OPTION and OPTGROUP mistakenly listed
onfocus, onblur, and
onchange. The "attributes defined elsewhere" section was missing for
the SELECT element (please see the DTD for the full list of
attributes).
- Section 17.9.1
- The tabindex attribute was said to be defined for the
LABEL element. It is not.
- Section 17.12.2
- The sentence "The following elements support the
readonly attribute: INPUT and
TEXTAREA." read "The following elements support the
readonly attribute: INPUT,
TEXT, PASSWORD, and
TEXTAREA."
- Section 18.2.2, "Local
declaration of a scripting language"
- The first paragraph read: "It is also possible to specify the scripting
language in each
SCRIPT element via the
type attribute. In the absence of a default scripting language
specification, this attribute must be set on each
SCRIPT element." Since the type attribute
is required for the SCRIPT element, this paragraph now
reads: "The type attribute must be specified for
each SCRIPT element instance in a document. The value of the
type attribute for a
SCRIPT element overrides the default scripting language for that
element."
- Section 21
- Added note that the spec includes some syntactic constraints that cannot be
expressed in the DTD.
- Section 24.2.1 and file HTMLlat1.ent
- The comment for the character reference "not" read "= discretionary
hyphen". This has been removed.
The FPI in comment read "-//W3C//ENTITIES Full Latin 1//EN//HTML", instead this
is now "-//W3C//ENTITIES Latin1//EN//HTML".
- Section 24.3.1 and file HTMLsymbol.ent
- The FPI in comment read "-//W3C//ENTITIES Symbolic//EN//HTML", instead this
is now "-//W3C//ENTITIES Symbols//EN//HTML".
- Section A.1.1, "New elements" (previously A.1.1)
and Section A.1.1, "Deprecated elements" (previously
A.1.2)
- The S element which is
deprecated was listed as part of the changes between HTML
3.2 and HTML 4.0. This element was not actually defined in HTML 3.2. It is now in the new elements
list.
- Section A.1.3 (previously A.3)
- The longdesc attribute was said to be specified for
tables. It is not. Instead, the summary attribute allows authors
to give longer descriptions of tables.
- Section B.4
- The sentence "You may help search engines by using the
LINK element with rel="start" along with the
title attribute, ..." read "You may help search engines by using the
LINK element with rel="begin" along with a
TITLE, ..." The same stands for the companion example.
- Section B.5.1
- The sentence "This can be altered by setting the width attribute of the
TABLE element." read "This can be altered by setting the width-TABLE
attribute of the
TABLE element."
- Section B.5.2
- The sentence "Rules for handling objects too large for a column apply when
the explicit or implied alignment results in a situation where the data exceeds
the assigned width of the column." read "too large for column". The meaning of
the sentence was unclear since it referred to "rules" governing an error
condition; user agent behavior in error conditions lies outside the scope of
the specification.
- Index of attributes
- The href attribute for the
BASE element was marked as
deprecated. It is not. However, it is not defined in the
Strict DTD either.
The language attribute for the
SCRIPT element was not marked as deprecated. It is now, and it
is no longer defined in the Strict DTD.
A.2.2 Minor typographical errors that were
corrected
- Section 2.1.3
- "Relative URIs are resolved ..." was "Relative URIsare resolved ...".
- Section 2.2.1
- The second word "of" was missing in "Despite never receiving consensus in
standards discussions, these drafts led to the adoption of a range of new
features."
- Section 3.3.3
- The sentence "Element types that are designed to have no content are called
empty elements." contained one too many "elements". The word "a" was missing in
the sentence "A few HTML element types use an additional SGML feature to
exclude elements from a content model".
Also, in list item two, a period was missing between "optional" and
"Two".
- Section 3.3.4
- In the section on "Boolean attributes", the sentence that begins "In HTML,
boolean attributes may appear in minimized ..." included a bogus word
"be".
- Section 6.3
- The sentence beginning "For introductory information about attributes, ..."
read "For introductory about attributes, ...".
- Section 6.6
- In the first sentence of the section on Pixels, "is an integer" read "is
integer".
- Section 7.4.1
- The first word "The" was missing at the beginning of the section
title.
- Section 7.4.4
- The last word "a" was missing in the sentence "The meaning of a property
and the set of legal values for that property should be defined in a reference
lexicon called profile."
- Section 7.5.2
- "Variable déclarée deux fois" read "Variable
déclaré deux fois".
- Section 9.2.2
- The language of the quotations was "en" instead of "en-us", while in
British English, the single quotation marks would delimit the outer
quotation.
- Section 9.3.2
- In the first line, the sixth character of "
" was the letter 'O'
instead of a zero.
- Section 10.3.1
- "(they are case-sensitive)" read "(the are case-sensitive)".
- Section 12.1.1
- In the sentence beginning "Note that the href attribute in each source ..."
the space was missing between "href" and "attribute".
- Section 12.1.2
- The sentence "Links that express other types of relationships have one or
more link types specified in their source anchors." read "Links that express
other types of relationships have one or more link type specified in their
source anchor."
- Section 12.1.5
- The second paragraph reads "the hreflang attribute provides user agents
about the language of a ..." It should read "the hreflang attribute provides
user agents with information about the language of a ..."
- Section 13.3.2
- In the sentence beginning "Any number of
PARAM elements may appear in the content of an
OBJECT or APPLET element, ..." a space was
missing between "APPLET" and "element".
- Section 14.2.2
- There was a bogus word "style" at the beginning of the sentence "The
style attribute specifies ..."
- Section 17.2
- In "Those controls for which name/value pairs are submitted are called
successful controls" the word "for" was missing.
- Section 17.10
- There was a bogus word "/samp" just before section 17.11.
- Section 17.11
- The first sentence read, "In an HTML document, an element must receive
focus from the user in order to become active and perform their tasks" (instead
of "its" tasks).
- Section 18.2.2
- Just before section 18.2.3, the sentence that includes "a name attribute
takes precedence over an id if both are set." read "over a id if both are
set.".
- Section 19.1
- The section title read "document Document Validation". It now is "Document
Validation".
- Section 21
- The FPI for the Transitional HTML 4.0 DTD was missing a closing double
quote.
- Section B.5.1/B.5.2
- This sections referred to a non-existent cols attribute. This
attribute is not part of HTML 4.0. Calculating the number of columns in a table
is described in section Section
11.2.4.3, in the chapter on tables. In sections B.5.1 and B.5.2,
occurrences of cols have been replaced by "the number of columns
specified by the COL and COLGROUP elements".
- Section B.5.2
- In the sentence "The values for the frame attribute have been chosen to
avoid clashes with the rules, align and valign attributes." a space was missing
between "the" and "frame" and the last attribute was "valign-COLGROUP".
- Section B.10.1
- The last sentence read "Once a file is uploaded, the processing agent
should process and store the it appropriately." "the it" was changed to
"it".
- Index of Elements
- "strike-through" in the description of the
S element read "sstrike-through".
This section describes how the 18 December 1997 specification of HTML 4.0
differs from HTML 3.2 ([HTML32]).
New elements
The new elements in HTML 4.0 are: ABBR,
ACRONYM,
BDO,
BUTTON,
COL,
COLGROUP,
DEL,
FIELDSET, FRAME,
FRAMESET, IFRAME,
INS,
LABEL,
LEGEND, NOFRAMES,
NOSCRIPT, OBJECT,
OPTGROUP, PARAM,
S (deprecated), SPAN,
TBODY,
TFOOT,
THEAD, and Q.
The following elements are
deprecated:
APPLET,
BASEFONT, CENTER,
DIR,
FONT,
ISINDEX,
MENU, S,
STRIKE, and U.
The following elements are obsolete: LISTING,
PLAINTEXT, and XMP. For
all of them, authors should use the PRE element instead.
- Almost all attributes that specify the presentation of an HTML document
(e.g., colors, alignment, fonts, graphics, etc.) have been deprecated in favor of style sheets. The list of attributes in the appendix
indicates which attributes have been
deprecated.
- The id and class attribute allow authors to assign
name and class information to
elements for style sheets, as anchors, for scripting, for object declarations,
eneral purpose document processing, etc.
A.3.3 Changes for accessibility
HTML 4.0 features many changes to promote accessibility, including:
- The title attribute may now be set on virtually every
element.
- Authors may provide long descriptions of tables (see the
summary attribute), images and frames (see the longdesc attribute).
A.3.4 Changes for meta data
Authors may now specify
profiles that provide explanations about meta data specified with the
META or
LINK elements.
A.3.5 Changes for text
- New features for internationalization allow authors to
specify text direction and language.
- The INS and DEL elements allow authors to mark up
changes in their documents.
- The ABBR and ACRONYM elements allow authors to mark
up abbreviations and acronyms in their documents.
A.3.6 Changes for links
- The id attribute makes any element the destination anchor of a
link.
The HTML 4.0 table model has grown out of early work on HTML+ and the
initial draft of
HTML3.0. The earlier model has been extended in response to requests from
information providers as follows:
- Authors may specify tables that may be incrementally displayed as the user
agent receives data.
- Authors may specify tables that are more accessible to users with
non-visual user agents.
- Authors may specify tables with fixed headers and footers. User agents may
take advantage of these when scrolling large tables or rendering tables to
paged media.
The HTML 4.0 table model also satisfies requests for optional column-based
defaults for alignment properties, more flexibility in specifying table frames
and rules, and the ability to align on designated characters. It is expected,
however, that style sheets will take over
the task of rendering tables in the near future.
In addition, a major goal has been to provide backwards compatibility with
the widely deployed Netscape implementation of tables. Another goal has been to
simplify importing tables conforming to the SGML CALS model. The latest draft
makes the align attribute compatible with the latest
versions of the most popular browsers. Some clarifications have been made to
the role of the dir attribute and recommended behavior when
absolute and relative column widths are mixed.
A new element,
COLGROUP, has been introduced to allow sets of
columns to be grouped with different width and alignment properties specified
by one or more COL elements. The semantics of
COLGROUP have been clarified over previous drafts, and
rules="basic" has been replaced by rules="groups".
The style attribute is included as a means for extending
the properties associated with edges and interiors of groups of cells. For
instance, the line style: dotted, double, thin/thick etc; the color/pattern
fill for the interior; cell margins and font information. This will be the
subject for a companion specification on style sheets.
The frame and rules attributes have been
modified to avoid SGML name clashes with each other, and to avoid clashes with
the align and
valign attributes. These changes were additionally motivated by the
desire to avoid future problems if this specification is extended to allow frame and rules attributes with other
table elements.
A.3.8 Changes for images, objects, and image
maps
- The OBJECT element allows generic inclusion of
objects.
- The IFRAME and
OBJECT elements allow authors to create embedded documents.
- The alt attribute is required on the
IMG and
AREA elements.
- The mechanism for creating
image maps now allows authors to create more accessible image maps. The
content model of the
MAP element has changed for this reason.
This specification introduces several new attributes and elements that
affect forms:
- The accesskey attribute allows authors to specify direct
keyboard access to form controls.
- The disabled attribute allows authors to make a form
control initially insensitive.
- The readonly attribute, allows authors to prohibit changes
to a form control.
- The LABEL element associates a label with a particular form
control.
- The FIELDSET element groups related fields together and,
in association with the LEGEND element, can be used to name the
group. Both of these new elements allow better rendering and better
interactivity. Speech-based browsers can better describe the form and graphic
browsers can make labels sensitive.
- A new set of attributes, in combination with scripts, allow form providers to verify
user-entered data.
- The BUTTON element and
INPUT with type set to "button" can be used
in combination with scripts to create
richer forms.
- The OPTGROUP element allows authors to group menu options
together in a SELECT, which is particularly important for form
accessibility.
- Additional changes for internationalization.
A.3.10 Changes for style sheets
HTML 4.0 supports a larger set of media descriptors so that authors
may write device-sensitive style sheets.
A.3.11 Changes for frames
HTML 4.0 supports frame documents andinline frames.
A.3.12 Changes for scripting
Many elements now feature event
attributes that may be coupled with scripts; the script is executed when
the event occurs (e.g., when a document is loaded, when the mouse is clicked,
etc.).
HTML 4.0 interates the recommendations of [RFC2070] for the
internationalization of HTML.
However, this specification and [RFC2070] differ as
follows: