HTML 4.0/SGML, (#PCDATA)* problem in TEXTAREA

Neil St.Laurent (neil@bigpic.com)
Tue, 29 Jul 1997 08:36:25 -0600 

Message-Id: <199707291432.IAA00326@underworld.bigpic.com>
From: "Neil St.Laurent" <neil@bigpic.com>
To: www-html@w3.org
Date: Tue, 29 Jul 1997 08:36:25 -0600
Subject: HTML 4.0/SGML, (#PCDATA)* problem in TEXTAREA

Firstly here is my HTML snippet:

<FORM><P><HELLO>
<TEXTAREA><HELLO> <P>&amp; out there in <TEXTAREA> land</TEXTAREA>
</FORM>

According to HTML 4.0 TEXTAREA has a content of #PCDATA, yet both IE 
and Netscape put the <HELLO><P> and <TEXTAREA> in the TEXTAREA field 
on the page, yet these are markup...

It seems <TEXTAREA>'s content is being treated as #RCDATA rather than 
#PCDATA?


Additionally, the (#PCDATA)* in the DTD seems incorrect:

SGML (ISO 8879)
11.2.4.2
rep   Optional and repeatable (0 or more times)
... The "#PCDATA" content toekn is regarded as having an occurance 
indicator of rep.

-
Putting the additional * on seems to break the content model because 
now technically we're allowed zero or more and an already possibly 
empty PCDATA.

Are we just confused about the standard or is there a genuine problem 
here?
__
| Mortar: Advanced Web Development <http://bigpic.com/mortar/>
| Neil St.Laurent  neil@bigpic.com
| Big Picture Multimedia