Re: Guidelines - DTD

I would like to reiterate most emphatically the importance of ensuring
that the guidelines themselves meet the highest standards of markup.
Conformity to the HTML 4.0 strict DTD would be a necessary, though not a
sufficient condition for this requirement to be met: there should be no
  character entities or any other characters used unnecessarily, the
markup should convey structure rather than presentation, the table should
use HEADERS, SCOPE, and SUMMARY attributes appropriately, etc. The best
means of achieving this result is to edit the markup by hand or with an
SGML editor (not a web authoring tool). I understand that SGML editors
verify compliance with the DTD as one makes changes to the document and
can help to ensure that the structure is sound.

Please note that in making these remarks, I am not implicitly criticising
previous versions of the document. To be frank, I haven't taken the time
to examine the markup in detail, but this task must be thoroughly
undertaken as part of the preparation of the next draft.

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 1998 01:40:53 UTC