Re: XMP and HTML 2.0 and 3.0

Dave Raggett (dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
Tue, 2 May 1995 12:51:39 +0500

> Yesterday, I read in the HTML 2.0 draft that the XMP tag was only supported
> for backward compatibility and that documents should use the PRE tag. The
> XMP tag is not even mentioned in the HTML 3.0 draft.

> OK but what should I use if I want a block of text to be inserted without
> any interpratation of HTML tags? I really need it. Did I miss something?

The XMP and PLAINTEXT tags don't conform to the SGML standard and hence
are regarded as obsolete tags for HTML3. You can still find them in the
DTD though in a marked section under %HTML.Obsolete.

I recommend you preprocess the block of text you wish to insert in the
HTML document to mapp any occurrences of "<", ">" and "&" to the character
enities: &lt; &gt; and &amp; respectively and then use the PRE element.

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> url = http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr
Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Filton Road, | tel: +44 117 922 8046
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