Re: Existing practice

Hi www-html,

> While we're 'encoding existing practice', is there any bloody
> use for SHORTTAG?  Can we dump it?

I don't think any SGML 'features' should be dropped as this practice
would move HTML even further away from the SGML track. This is true even
if I consider SHORTTAGs a bad SGML feature, too.
No existing browser is fully SGML complient and probably never will be.
Just think of the entity-discussion that took place here some weeks ago.
Any production system, validation tool or HTML generating tool should be
compliant. It's easy becaus sp (=nsglms) is out there and it can be used
to wipe out things like SHORTTAG. You simply won't see them if you rely
on the parser output rather than on the HTML textfile. I consider the 
practice of grep-ing through text harmful compared to moving along
the SGML parser tree.

Virtually yours,
Ingo
-- 
Campus:  Ingo.Macherius@tu-clausthal.de      http://www.tu-clausthal.de/~inim
Siemens: Ingo.Macherius@mwe.hvr.scn.de       http://www.scn.de/~inim
 information != knowledge != wisdom != truth != beauty != music == best (FZ)

Received on Wednesday, 8 May 1996 15:08:39 UTC