- From: Joe Wells <jbw@cs.bu.edu>
- Date: Sat, 21 Oct 1995 00:32:12 -0400
- To: www-html@w3.org
- Cc: narnett@verity.com (Nick Arnett)
Hi, folks, My thanks go to Nick Arnett for pointing out the only currently working hypertext archive of the www-html mailing list, at <URL:http://asearch.mccmedia.com/www-html/>. I followed various links to 4 other archive sites (including the one at EIT I mentioned earlier) and none of the others were currently working. Some of them had stopped archiving more than a year ago. Changing subjects, during this brief search I was somewhat depressed by the bad HTML I found at all of these sites. I would like to think that authors of HTML-generating software (like mailing list hypertext archives) would be aware of the standard, but there is a lot of stuff that gets written because it happens to work with some browser. For example, at the URL above is this line (broken into multiple lines for readability): <ul>View by: <b>DATE</b> - <a href="replies.html"><b>REPLY COUNT</b></a> - <a href="subject.html"><b>SUBJECT</b></a> <a href="search.html"><p><b>SEARCH THIS LIST</b></a><p> My web browser gives 23 error messages about this single line, because everything between the <UL> and the first <LI> is illegal. The <P> tag inside the A element is even worse. My web browser doesn't display any of this. I'm thinking about changing it to pretend it saw an <LI> if it sees illegal data in this context. This is horribly contrary to the SGML standard, because the LI element's start-tag may not be omitted. It's even worse in HTML 3.0 because, even if the start-tag could be omitted, the parser could be expecting a LH element instead and I don't think SGML allows inferring a start-tag in that case. Oh, well. :-( -- Joe Wells <jbw@cs.bu.edu>
Received on Saturday, 21 October 1995 00:33:41 UTC