a bad idea

Would it be difficult to make a DTD for something like this.....
<ANYTAG PICK-VARNAME=PICK-METHOD VARNAME=X1 VARNAME=X2 ..........
VARNAME=XN>

That way any tag can have multiple choices for variables, with an
optional picking mechanism

The default mechanism for picking a variable would be "try the first, if
for some reason that fails, try the second, etc."

This would be useful for ... fonts that aren't on the client system,
alternate images, alternate URL's etc.
This way nobody would have to learn a new syntax....every tag would work
the same.
PICK-METHOD would be TRY, RANDOM, USER-SELECT, etc.

I guess with SGML, you can't have an arbitrary number of identical names
per tag....but it wouldn't be hard to implement in practice.

Received on Wednesday, 10 July 1996 10:07:50 UTC