- What Is Well-Formedness?
- Change Name to Lowercase
- Quote Attribute Value
- Fill In Omitted Attribute Value
- Replace Empty Tag with Empty-Element Tag
- Add End-tag
- Remove Overlap
- Convert Text to UTF-8
- Escape Less-Than Sign
- Escape Ampersand
- Escape Quotation Marks in Attribute Values
- Introduce an XHTML DOCTYPE Declaration
- Terminate Each Entity Reference
- Replace Imaginary Entity References
- Introduce a Root Element
- Introduce the XHTML Namespace
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Fill In Omitted Attribute Value
Add values to all valueless attributes.
<input type="radio" name="p" value="debit" checked></input> <input name="generator" value="system78" readonly></input> <input name="date" value="2007-12-17" disabled></input> <a href="http://example.com/imagemap/library"> <img src="duane.png" ismap></a>
<input type="radio" name="p" value="debit" checked="checked" /> <input name="generator" value="system78" readonly='readonly' / <input name="date" value="2007-12-17" disabled="disabled"></input> <a href="http://example.com/imagemap/library"> <img src="duane.png" ismap="ismap"></a>
Motivation
XHTML does not support the attribute name-only syntax.
Potential Trade-offs
Minimal. Browsers are perfectly happy to read the values you supply.
Mechanics
Omitted attribute values are fairly rare in practice. The only place they're at all common is in forms and image maps. It may well be possible to manually fix all occurrences on a site without a great deal of effort. Alternatively, you can just use Tidy or TagSoup.
To fix one, just set the attribute value to the name. For example, change this:
<input type="radio" name="p" checked>
into this:
<input type="radio" name="p" checked='checked'>
Only a few elements and attributes support valueless attributes in the first place:
- input: checked, disabled, readonly, ismap
- optgroup: disabled
- option: selected, disabled
- textarea: disabled, readonly
- button: disabled
- script: defer
- img: ismap, controls
- area: nohref
- dl: compact
- ul: compact
- ol: compact
- ul: compact, plain
- frame: noresize
- table: border
- marquee: truespeed
- link: disabled
- style: disabled
- applet: mayscript
- select: disabled, multiple
- object: declare
Because many of the words involved can appear in plain text, it is not safe to use regular expressions to replace these. However, you can use a simple search to find them and then verify and fix them manually. For the attributes that aren't actually English words, such as ismap and mayscript, just search for those words. For the attributes that are, such as border and compact, use a regular expression such as this:
<.*\s+compact\s+.*>
Then search for the case where the valueless attribute is the last attribute:
<.*\s+compact\s*>