Re: [CSS21] Wider variety of (non-junk) examples requested

> "neophilic adherence to fashionable syntaxes", I think most would 
> phrase it as "advocating careful coding practices".  But if the 

The use of the term "coding practices" here hints at one of the big
culture differences here.  The SVG side seems to be treating HTML
as a non-procedural programming language for web applications, whereas
HTML was intended as a markup language for text documents.

As a markup language, it is advantageous not to have lots of redundant
markup artefacts, so SGML allows one to specify that some tags may
be omitted, providing that there is no ambiguity in the parse tree.
Note that an HTML parser that parses according to the specification does
parse the document deterministically and doesn't 'correct' missing </p>
tags; they are syntactic sugar except when followed by text nodes (which,
for HTML 4, can only happen in non-strict HTML).

Incidentally, this means that the CSS specification needs to retain
at least some HTML because there are cases in which XHTML has been 
compromised in such a way that it will produce a different parse tree
when fed to an HTML parser, even after allowing for things like <.../>.
This is certainly the case for tbody elements, which always exist in 
HTML tables but are optional in XHTML.  In this case, XHTML chose to 
maintain lexical compatibility with typical HTML use of tables rather
than syntactic compatibility.

Received on Friday, 26 August 2005 19:59:12 UTC