- From: Michael Johnson <michaelj@relay.relay.com>
- Date: Fri, 16 Dec 94 07:47:54 EST
- To: www-html@www0.cern.ch (HTML discussion list)
>It is common usage, that for elements which appear in inclusion exception >lists end tag omission is not allowed. Otherwise the place where an end tag >would be implied by a SGML parser would depend very much on the version of >the HTML DTD used, since it would be the first start tag not allowed in the >content of A preceding an end tag of an element enclosing the anchor tag. Sorry, call me dense but I don't see how this is any more difficult to deal with than the way that LI (for example) is used. Yes, A is specifically excluded from appearing inside an anchor, while LI can appear inside a list which is inside an LI, but that seems to me to be of no consequence. >That was: regarding _SGML parsers_. A WWW client would either use a simpler >method (deviating from them SGML standard), or clients would have to be >SGML-aware. Both are undesirable consequences. > >Finally, not only WWW clients would have to figure out where the A element >ends, but authors of HTML documents would have to do that, too. Within the limits of my understanding, that would seem to be the case already with LI and similar tags. I'm not so sure that having clients be SGML-aware is undesirable, either. A convention could be established that end-tag omission on an anchor is only used when the anchor is defining a name, never when the anchor is defining a hypertext link. Authors who violate this convention would get what they deserve. As it happens, this appears to be the de-facto state of affairs, at least so far as WebMaker is concerned. If this is not to be the standard, then WebMaker needs to be changed and any documents using this technique need to be cleaned up. Michael Johnson Relay Technology, Inc.
Received on Friday, 16 December 1994 14:00:58 UTC