more (or Re:) XHTML Comments

I would like to support some of the arguments of David Brownell, 
in particular the issue of multiple DTDs.

As far as I understand the ONLY REASON why there are separate 
transitional and frameset DTDs in HTML4.0 is the one mentioned in 
a comment in the loose DTD:

<!--
  The content model for HTML documents depends on whether the HEAD is
  followed by a FRAMESET or BODY element. The widespread omission of
  the BODY start tag makes it impractical to define the content model
  without the use of a marked section.
-->
from http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/sgml/loosedtd.html

If I understand the comment correctly it means that if 
the content model of the html element was declared as
<!ELEMENT HTML O O (HEAD,(BODY|FRAMESET))>
ommiting the start tag of the BODY in normal (non-frameset)  
documents would be considered as an error by an SGML parser, 
even if the start tag of BODY is declared as optional. 
	
Since in XHTML all start tags are required, the only reason for 
two DTDs goes away.

It seems reasonable that if the DTDs of transitional 
and frameset are merged, they cannot have two names 
spaces.

Regards,
Nir Dagan.

At 01:40 PM 9/14/99 -0400, David Brownell wrote:
>Greetings,
>
>The XHTML draft (http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/) doesn't give an address to
>use for feedback, so I'll send these to the www-html list instead.
>
...
>- THIRD, looking at the DTDs I confess I'm puzzled why they didn't get
>  written as one DTD using two parameter entities to conditionally
>  include declarations for the two categories of non-"strict" names.
>
>  Things would be a lot clearer if the DTD actually reflected its logical
>  structure in that way -- or at least commented why it wasn't done.
>  (I know there's separate work on modularization, but one can provide
>  better DTDs without defining an approach to fine-grained modules.)
...
>- Dave
> 
===================================
Nir Dagan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Brown University 
Providence, RI
USA

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com
tel:+1-401-863-2145

Received on Wednesday, 15 September 1999 09:58:57 UTC