Re: HTML APIs

Add a valid doctype to the original and it is a valid HTML 4 document (and I
believe 3.2).

One more thing - I was "caught out" once by having whitespace preceding the
doctype - not allowed by the spec! (since until the doctype is read nothing can
be deemed valid, I guess ;-))

Russ

-----Original Message-----
From: Mike Champion <mcc@arbortext.com>
To: John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>; www-dom@w3.org <www-dom@w3.org>
Date: Wednesday, December 30, 1998 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: HTML APIs


At 01:45 PM 12/30/98 -0500, John Cowan wrote:
>There is no such thing as an HTML document without an HTML element.
>HTML, like HEAD and BODY and a few other elements, allows omission of
>both the start-tag and the end-tag.  So a (minimal) HTML document:
>
> <TITLE>Foo</TITLE>Bar


Paste the above into a file and bring it up in Netscape. No complaints.

This is certainly not valid HTML 4.0 (or any other version of the standard
I can imagine), but it is "HTML-ish" in the sense that it looks enough like
HTML for the browsers to make sense out of it, and thus (I'm sad to say)
for many, many people to happily write documents in "HTML-ish" and put them
out on the Web.

Mike Champion

Received on Wednesday, 30 December 1998 17:07:43 UTC