Re: Well-formed (was: Re: F2F Proposed Resolutions Draft Updates)

Hi Christophe,

Thank you for your reply.

On 17/06/05, Christophe Strobbe <christophe.strobbe@esat.kuleuven.be> wrote:
> In Brussels, we tried to define a level of "correctness" that is lower than
> validity and that still makes sense for formats that are not based on XML.
> It is true that SGML does not define well-formedness, but if you say that a
> well-formed document is essentially "one that can unambiguously be parsed
> to create
> a logical tree in memory" (Jon Bosak, at
> http://www.isgmlug.org/n3-1/n3-1-18.htm),
> then you can apply this concept also to SGML.

Valid HTML can unambiguously be parsed to create a logical tree in
memory. The only tags that do not require closing tags in HTML are
those where there could be no ambiguity. For example, list items are
automatically closed in HTML if a new list item is started with the
same parent as the current list item, and paragraphs are automatically
closed with the start of a block-level element. Admittedly, the
parsing rules are more difficult to implement than for markup
languages that are well-formed, but still relatively easily to
implement, and the responsibility of markup consumers rather than
content developers.

> Because "SGML applications" have an SGML declaration, I think it is possible
> to define (and, consequently, require) something that may be called
> "well-formedness" for HTML.

Sorry, but I'm still confused by this. Would the following snippet of
HTML pass WCAG 2 with no extra effort required from the content
author?

<P>
Some text
<UL>
<LI>One
<LI>Two
<LI>Three
</UL>
<P>
More text

If this is acceptable for WCAG 2, then I don't think that
"well-formedness" is a good term as it already has an accepted meaning
that conflicts with the snippet of markup above. If this isn't
acceptable for WCAG 2, then this will have far more dire consequences
than requiring that documents conform to their appropriate DTD/Schema.

Best regards,

Gez


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Received on Friday, 17 June 2005 17:44:56 UTC