On Sat, 26 Mar 2005, David Dorward wrote:

> HTML was designed before XML, XSLT and XHTML were, so it didn't take
> into consideration any design implications it would cause for them.

That's correct, but in this issue, it was also designed without really
thinking in SGML terms. "Boolean attributes" (which are even called that
way in HTML specifications) don't fit into SGML philosophy, although they
were formally retrofitted into SGML formalism. It would be have been much
more SGML-like to have an attribute that takes two values, like "checked"
and "unchecked", the latter being the default, and the attribute name
being 'status' for example.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/