Re: Reanimate <xmp>

j.j. wrote:
> 
> Hello!
> 
> There is some noise on the list about the revenant <xmp>.
> We should bring it back to real life.
> 
> 
> HISTORY
> 
> The <xmp> element was part of the first HTML standard [1].
> It has support of all mayor web browsers [2] back to the early days of the
> web. Actual browser support is as described in a footnote of HTML2 [3].
> 
> This gives a taste of the discussions 15 years ago [4]:
> 
>   >[...] I hope I've misunderstood, if you are proposing to replace
>   >XMP with PRE. Another problem with this replacement is
>   >the quoting problem. With XMP, you don't need to worry about whether
>   >or not your arbitrary text contains something which looks like an HTML
>   >tag. This is an important feature, and one which should be kept IMHO.
> 
>   [...] Even the XMP semantics are no good. In SGML, the
>   string "</" is recognized as markup iff it's followed by a name start
>   character (a letter). The above HTML documentation says </ is only
>   markup if it's followed by XMP, i.e. "</XMP>" is the _only_ string
>   that ends an XMP section. This is not expressible in SGML.
> 
> Dan Connolly's arguments are invalid these days, so we should bring back
> <xmp> to the standard.

They're still valid in that it's not expressible in XML. Defining it for 
one of the two serializations only doesn't seem worthwhile.

Dao

Received on Monday, 10 December 2007 11:12:11 UTC