- From: Stephanos Piperoglou <spip@hol.gr>
- Date: Sat, 10 May 1997 20:06:47 +0300 (EET DST)
- To: Chad Owen Yoshikawa <chad@CS.Berkeley.EDU>
- cc: papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca, www-html@w3.org
On Fri, 9 May 1997, Chad Owen Yoshikawa wrote: > I'll either end up creating a 'lenient DTD' and/or a 'lenient parser' > - I'll go off and think about it and see how hard it is to modify the > parser itself. I guess this is the problem of having the HTML 'browsers' come > out before the HTML 'generators' :( If you're making a browser, my proposal would be to avoid making your parser DTD-based. Firstly, since you'll have to modify ANYWAY, it's a lot less work to modify your code. Secondly, DTDs are not for browsers to use. It is the author's responsibility to validate their HTML against a DTD, and that's why we have DTDs, invalidating your statement about "generators". SGML tools like SP can validate against new DTDs without any need to upgrade their software, whilst user agents need to be updated for each new DTD. Since the smashing majority of documents on the Web lack <!DOCTYPE... your DTD based parser would parse according to an assumed DTD, and the assumption will rarely be valid. In short, the problem in your case is making a DTD based parser for a browser. In short, don't do it. Write as liberal a code as possible for recognising HTML. -- Stephanos "Pippis" Piperoglou - http://users.hol.gr/~spip/index.html I've never finished anything I began, but this time I'm
Received on Saturday, 10 May 1997 13:08:01 UTC