- From: <marc@ckm.ucsf.edu>
- Date: Wed, 7 Aug 1996 21:47:53 -0700
- To: www-html@w3.org, www-style@w3.org
Gavin wrote: <SPAM CLASS=SPAM>SPAM</SPAM> |I often use this when teaching people about DTD design and what is |good markup. This DTD has uses, but I think we all agree that this is |*not* the best way to markup important documents. 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. 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. 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. In the future, will HTML become the DTD of Last Resort? -marc "HTML is not markup for the ages" -Stu Weibel
Received on Thursday, 8 August 1996 00:53:17 UTC