- From: Ian S. Graham <igraham@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
- Date: Fri, 7 Apr 95 14:21:13 EDT
- To: www-html@www10.w3.org
> > >Currently, the server doesn't need to parse the document at all. > >This would be the first such case. (systems with server-side includes > >already do some parsing, though). > > True, but the parse is pretty easy, and it can stop when it reaches > <BODY>. This type of request would not be used very often, only > for indexing tools, existence checks, robots, etc. > > >What should it do for a document without a HEAD? > > This could happen for non-html fetches, of course. > It should return an error - my first impulse, not having thought > about it much. > > Similarly, I guess it should return an error if it got EOF before > </HEAD>. Either that, or it might be probably easier to just send > the whole document part after <HEAD> til EOF, assuming it is scanning > for <HEAD>, then just outputing chars until </HEAD>. > The HEAD and BODY tags are *not* mandatory under the current draft of the HTML 3.0 RFC. This makes the parsing somewhat more difficult -- I suppose you could parse until you find the first non-HEAD element, assuming that all documents have the elements in the correct order.... I believe the RFC should make the HEAD and BODY tags mandatory. It's not such a big deal, and makes enforcement of good document structure a lot easier. Ian -- Ian Graham .................................. igraham@utirc.utoronto.ca Instructional and Research Computing University of Toronto
Received on Friday, 7 April 1995 14:21:20 UTC