Re: doctype inconsistency

Paul Arveson wrote:
> 
> According to the HTML 4.01 specification, the only legal options for the
> DOCTYPE declaration contain a URI to a DTD at W3C.  However,
> W3C's own documents do not contain this URI, e.g. on pages of the
> specification such as 
> 
> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html
> 
> This seems to be an inconsistency, and not only that -- it seems to imply
> that in the future, all web pages are going to have to link to a server at
> W3C in order to be rendered properly???  
> 
> Please write something to clarify this inconsistency (if not error) in the
> specification of version declarations.

I think you're right that this statement in section 7.2 is too strong:

   "HTML 4.01 specifies three DTDs, so authors must include one 
   of the following document type declarations in their documents."

I believe that the formal public identifier is required, 
but the system identifier is not.

 _ Ian


-- 
Ian Jacobs (jacobs@w3.org)   http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs
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