- From: Dave Peterson <davep@acm.org>
- Date: Fri, 14 Mar 1997 08:46:54 -0500
- To: w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
At 6:09 PM 3/12/97, Terry Allen wrote:
> <empty/>
>is one of the worst warts on the present spec, inviting error
>and difficult to explain ("<IMG> works fine in HTML, <anchor>
>works fine in SGML, what's the problem?" "Conformance with SGML.")
Cheap shot? It's not conformance with SGML that's the problem.
It's that with HTML we have, if not a fixed set of element types,
at least a short-term-fixed set of element types declared EMPTY.
Since those types are known ahead of time by name, that much of
the "HTML DTD" is built into every HTML parser. It's the fact
that XML wants to continue to permit EMPTY element types, doesn't
want to pre-specify their names, and wants to parse without reference
to a DTD that forces XML to differentiate between the tag for empty elements
that don't use an end-tag and the start-tag of elements that do use
end-tags.
Dave Peterson
SGMLWorks!
davep@acm.org
Received on Friday, 14 March 1997 08:47:59 UTC