Form elements and the rest of the document

I'm new to this list, so forgive me if this has been brought up before. I
didn't find it in the archives since Jan 96, so...

I have been writing a parser to deal with HTML, and in the course of this
task I have come across something that I cannot fit into the larger scheme
of things.

Why is it that the DTD for HTML 3.2 allows tags like INPUT and TEXTAREA
(which don't appear to have much of a function outside of a form) to appear
outside the context of a form? In fact, they seem to fit into a great many
contexts, here's the list I have collected:

BODY ADDRESS DIV CENTER TT I B U STRIKE BIG SMALL SUB SUP EM STRONG DFN
CODE SAMP KBD VAR SITE FONT A TEXTFLOW P H1 H2 H3 H4 H5 H6 PRE BLOCKQUOTE
DT DD LI FORM CAPTION TH TD

Thanks,

Sunil

Received on Wednesday, 10 July 1996 00:48:39 UTC