Re: Comments in HTML ?

Dan Connolly (connolly@pixel.convex.com)
Fri, 20 Nov 92 15:00:52 CST


Message-Id: <9211202100.AA02019@pixel.convex.com>
To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
Cc: K.Hoadley@directory.rl.ac.uk, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: Comments in HTML ? 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 19 Nov 92 18:27:46 +0100."
             <9211191727.AA00350@www3.cern.ch> 
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 15:00:52 CST
From: Dan Connolly <connolly@pixel.convex.com>


I was wrong: <!-- comment foo --> _is_ recognized in the
instance, or so the standard and sgmls say.

I'm trying to put together a lex style specification of
the lexical elements of HTML. It will almost certainly
conflict with current usage.

But I think the reason current usage is broken is that
the SGML standard is so obtuse.

I believe if I write up a lex specification of exactly
what characters mean what and when, and it's only a
couple pages of lex code, the folks will implement
it faithfully.

As is is now, everybody just writes their own ad-hoc
finite state machine. That's too error prone.

Dan