Re: Alternative structures

>>>>> "WIK" == Walter Ian Kaye <boo@best.com> writes:

WIK> Not every kind of document can be shoehorned into outline
WIK> format. For some documents, outline format is ideal, no question
WIK> about it. But for other documents, it simply doesn't apply.

WIK> Comments?

 Isn't this equivalent to saying that one DTD doesn't fit all
documents?  After all, the usual example I see for explaining SGML is
a memo, with TO, FROM, and RE elements.  How would one do this in
HTML?

<H1 CLASS=TO> boo@best.com</H1>
<H1 CLASS=FROM>lazio@spacenet.tn.cornell.edu</H1>
<H1 CLASS=RE> DTDs </H1>
[etc.]

Sure doesn't seem ideal to me.

 The HTML model is a series of block-like structures which form a
document.  It bears a suspicious resemblence to many academic papers.
Is it ideal for every document?  No.

 But to do better don't we need browsers which understand

<!DOCTYPE BLAH SYSTEM blah.dtd>

and can pull over blah.dtd from the server, then use that to parse 
the document? (Then what about formatting? the browser would also
have to know about style sheets so that <TO> could be rendered as
something sensible.)

-- 
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Lt. Lazio, HTML police   | http://astrosun.tn.cornell.edu/students/lazio/
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Received on Tuesday, 16 April 1996 15:41:19 UTC