[WSG]
    start attribute deprecated in XHTML 1.0 Strict and up.

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:35:30 -0700 

I was looking at some data of the form:

AQUACULTURE
                1. Scientists: Salmon Hatchery Policy Flawed (USA)
                2. Fish Farms Seen Harming Dive Tourism (Malta)
                3. Escaped Farmed Salmon Find Home (Alaska)
COASTAL DEVELOPMENT
                4. Mayor Casts Doubt Over Magnetic Is Report (Great Barrier Reef)
                5. Hope for Maldives Rises from the Sea (Maldives)

...and looking at the how of doing that; <ol start="4"> type stuff and thought I'd check the specs as to how valid this is going forward. As usual the W3C docs were of little immediate help so a Google search turned up this:

http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2004-March/ 000255.html

--------------------------------------------

1.  The Transitional doctypes for HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 support
    the `start` attribute for `<ol>`, and a `value` attribute for
    `<li>`. You can use them like this:

        <ol start="10">
        <li>Ten</li>
        <li>Eleven</li>
        <li value="20">Twenty</li>
        </ol>

    which renders like this:

        10. Ten
        11. Eleven
        20. Twenty

2.  The W3C deprecated both of these attributes; thus they're
    invalid in the Strict doctypes for HTML 4.01 or XHTML 1.0.

    A lot of experts consider this deprecation, especially
    the `value` attribute, a very bad decision on the part of
    the W3C. For example, [Tantek Çelik] [1].

    [1]: http://tantek.com/log/2003/01.html#L20030102t0602

    The basic idea behind attribute deprecation is that
    *presentational* attributes have been deprecated, because
    one should use CSS for presentation styling. But the `value`
    attribute for list items is not presentational, it specifies
    important information about the meaning of the list.

--------------------------------------------

Now I'm not using XHTML higher than 1.0 Transitional but I thought this was noteworthy ...if it is correct. For any of you using XHTML 1.0 Strict and up, it is possibly something that may influence your decision making.

Nick
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