Re: deprecated tags in Wilbur & Cougar -Reply -Reply

>Who *ever* claimed that the evolution of HTML proceeded in the "best way"
>by any measure?  The formal DTD came along after the usage curve had
>began to grow asymptotic.

Nobody has ever claimed this to my knowledge, nor do I say that
anyone has.
 
>Some publishing applications don't require the burden of mastering another
>SGML application, and for those cases HTML should provide an optional entry
>point to generic structural markup.

HTML is a great glue language.
 
>Complex collections will of course be marked up behind-the-server according
>to much richer, application-specific DTDs, such as TEI or EAD.  But the
>cleanest scheme to preserve the most of that rich structural information
>from documents marked up in an arbitrary DTD during the down-translation
>to a delivery/presentation markup format as accessible and generic as HTML
>is to let the attributes do the talking.

Here I disagree. Attributes are fine, but you can do the same thing
without reliance upon them. I know, I wrote an SGML->HTML conversion
server...
 
>In the future, will HTML become the DTD of Last Resort?

I hope not. As I noted, it is a great, and becoming better glue
language. For many people, it is enough, for others, it is hopelessly
inadequate, which is the point I, and others have been trying to make
for a very long time... 

Received on Thursday, 8 August 1996 09:27:31 UTC