Re: meaning and rationale of reference to SGML rules found in HTML 4 section 3.2.1

On 9 Jan 2012, at 6:27 PM, Edward McGuire wrote:

> I am trying to understand the meaning and rationale of a sentence
> added to the HTML 4 standard in section 3.2.1. The sentence first
> appeared in the edition REC-html40-971218:
> 
> "Please consult the SGML standard for information about rules
> governing elements (e.g., they must be properly nested, an end tag
> closes all omitted start tags up to the matching start tag (section
> 7.5.1), etc.)."
> -- http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40-971218/intro/sgmltut.html#h-3.2.1
> 
> I imagine there was some discussion of that addition, but I cannot
> find any public mailing lists which have a record of it. Other than
> public mailing lists, I really don't know where to start looking. If
> someone would be so kind as to point me in the right direction ...

Hi Edward,

I looked for a short while and did not find discussion in a public archive.

The document includes in the abstract:

  "HTML 4.0 is an SGML application conforming to International Standard ISO 8879 -- Standard Generalized Markup Language [ISO8879])."

The mention of SGML in the tutorial was to re-emphasize that the tutorial was incomplete.

Is there some particular reason you were looking at this?

Ian


> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Edward McGuire
> Fort Worth, Texas
> 
> 
> 
> 

--
Ian Jacobs (ij@w3.org)    http://www.w3.org/People/Jacobs/
Tel:                                      +1 718 260 9447

Received on Tuesday, 10 January 2012 03:15:41 UTC