Re: Toward Closure on HTML

William M. Perry (wmperry@indiana.edu)
Tue, 5 Apr 94 13:20 EDT

Daniel Connolly writes:
>In message <m0po9a4-000062C@monolith>, William M. Perry writes:
>>
>> The great thing about the HTML+ DTD is ... get ready... it is actually
>>parseable by commercial (and free) SGML editors/validators. Unlike the old
>>html spec.
>
>Which html spec lacked a DTD? I have several versions, including
>the one from info.cern.ch that work fine (except that documents
>from NCSA rarely parse :-)

Well, I was referring to the problems people had getting the older HTML
DTDs to pass through sgmls without totally dying.

>Here's hoping!
>
>>
>> How's this for a proposal:
>>
>>1. Get rid of <p> tag and replace it with double-\n
>>2. Get rid of <li> tag and replace it with \t*
>>3. Get rid of <dd> tag and replace it with \n
>>4. Get rid of <dt> tag and replace it with \t*
>>5. etc
>>6. etc
>>
>> That would increase the readability of the text immensely.
>
>Now if we do this, folks will _have_ to start using SGML parsers to
>validate documents when they write them, and they'll _have_ to use real
>SGML parsers at runtime. This stuff _can_ be represented with SGML
>SHORTREFs, but I don't think you'd like the situation you'd end up with --
>one misplaced '*' character could screw up the whole parse.

Maybe I should have put a lot of smileys after that. :) :) :) I would be
totally against using \n\n as a paragraph separator.

-Bill P.