Re: SGML and HTML

* <olafBuddenhagen@web.de> wrote:
>What I really meant to ask: Can a HTML document be called "correct"
>(without assigning any specific technical meaning to that term), if it's
>formally valid, but doesn't follow the recommendations about SGML usage
>mentioned in the standard?...

Depends on the definition of "correct" here...

>Or on a more practical view: Should a browser, in this situation we are
>in, try to implement as much of SGML as possible, even if nobody can use
>it anyways?

If as much as possible means to ensure that web sites which "work" in
competitor's browsers do not break in your browsers: maybe. However,
I don't think there is much that can be implemented without breaking
anything and after all, you cannot devolp a conforming HTML 4.01 user
agent and still support XHTML 1.0, so W3C probably does not want to
see conforming HTML 4.01 user agents in the wild.

>And is it OK to report constructs that are handled
>incorrectly by most browsers as "errors"?

It is not ok to report something as an error that is no error.
Call it a warning.

>Well, I'm aware this list is not really the right place to ask such
>questions... I just can't think of any forum where I could get an answer
>that is authoritative in any sense :-(

www-html, www-html-editor.

>I was able to figure out much by various hints and by feeding tricky
>test cases to the validator. But I've still no idea why an SGML parser
>will accept <hr/> for example -- according to the BNF productions (the
>only part of the standard I could find on the web), a net-enabling start
>tag is never explicitely closed, so should not the > be treated as
>content?...

Yes. That's what the Validator does.

>The only question here is whether it wasn't better if browsers aware of
>XHTML ignored the MIME type in such a situation? But only the major
>vendors are really in a position to decide on this -- as long as the
>popular browsers accecpt broken (so called) XHTML, every browser not
>doing so will close itself out completely :-(

See <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2000Sep/0024.html>.

However, I am not sure what they mean by "should be treated as HTML" as
the document would break it is processed as HTML document. They probably
mean "tag soup".

Received on Sunday, 7 September 2003 21:48:35 UTC