- From: Todd Fahrner <fahrner@pobox.com>
- Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 16:22:50 -0700
- To: Ian Hickson <exxieh@bath.ac.uk>, Stephanos Piperoglou <sp249@cam.ac.uk>
- Cc: Chris Wilson <cwilso@microsoft.com>, www-style@w3.org
Ian Hickson wrote (9:44 PM +0100 5/19/98): " (o) Use Backwards Compatible 'Tag Soup' Parsing when there " is no valid DOCTYPE, use Strict SGML parsing otherwise. " ( ) Always use Backwards Compatible 'Tag Soup' Parsing. " ( ) Always use Strict SGML parsing (complain when no DTD) " Stop parsing when encountering invalid markup. At this point, I don't see any reason to believe (nor, frankly, much reason to hope) that anybody's going to release a validating SGML browser for the mass market (i.e., cross-platform, free, and capable of doing something friendly when it hits real web documents). I do see reason to hope and believe that soon, mass-market browsers will parse documents that begin with <?xml version="1.0"?> . They'd better be well-formed, but apart from that, their elements and most of their grammar might come straight from the HTML DTD(s) of your choice. This will make them viewable in legacy browsers, at least in most cases. Whether or not they actually validate is up to the author - maybe even to write the DTD, too. The browser, in any case, will be able to parse them and use a stylesheet if they're well-formed. In the beginning, these documents will be transmogrified on-the-fly into a thin HTML tag soup for legacy HTML renderers to deal with, as a display format - tables, font tags, spacer GIFs, frames, inline CSS, Javascript - anything goes! Eventually (I fervently hope) more suitable display languages will be deployed to help bury the war-torn corpse of "D[ynamic/isplay]HTML". PGML? * I've been editing the HTML 4.0 Strict DTD to require more well-formedness. It's a long way from XML yet (and I would probably miss the exit anyway), but I don't doubt that an XML profile of HTML will soon emerge from more expert efforts. Just imagine: a DTD for describing the structure and semantics of general purpose documents, with hyperlinks to arbitrary Internet resources - even images and sounds! This time, though, there'll be a style language to help keep default renderings from ever emerging. * Stupid stunt: how to produce vertical whitespace in Netscape 3.0 with XML-compliant HTML: <div class="br"> </div> <div class="br"> </div> <div class="br"> </div> lather, rinse, repeat. set display of class br to "none" and style as usual. Todd Fahrner mailto:todd@lowbrow.com http://www.verso.com/agitprop/ The printed page transcends space and time. The printed page, the infinitude of books, must be transcended. THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY. - El Lissitzky, 1923
Received on Tuesday, 19 May 1998 19:15:24 UTC