- From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Tue, 18 Jul 1995 16:04:32 -0400 (EDT)
- To: sears@vt.edu (Pris Sears)
- Cc: www-html@www10.w3.org
> Is there anything useful this group can do to rein in Netscape-isms? I think that it can help to fight the myth that the way to "extend" HTML is through new tags. My personal feeling is that the draft standard[1] contributes to this problem with these lines: To facilitate experimentation and interoperability between implementations of various versions of HTML, the installed base of HTML user agents supports a superset of the HTML 2.0 language by reducing it to HTML 2.0: markup in the form of a start-tag or end-tag, whose generic identifier is not declared is mapped to nothing during tokenization. Undeclared attributes are treated similarly. The entire attribute specification of an unknown attribute (i.e., the unknown attribute and its value, if any) should be ignored. On the other hand, references to undeclared entities should be treated as data characters. The standard goes on to say things which I very much agree with about not depending on this behaviour. I'm not sure what the point of this paragraph is, though. Is it meant to encourage a behaviour? or specify it? Of course any good Internet client program tries to gracefully recover from bad input, but why single out this particular mistake? Why is this paragraph in the HTML specification? The SGML mechanism for "experimentation and interoperability" is the DTD, not client-side down-translation of incorrect data. If clients do not know how to read a DTD, then servers must do the down-translation. Paul Prescod [1]ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-hmtl-spec-04.txt
Received on Tuesday, 18 July 1995 16:06:58 UTC