Re: HTML providers: please grab sgmls and the DTD
Dan Connolly (connolly@pixel.convex.com)
Tue, 01 Dec 92 20:42:24 CST
Message-Id: <9212020242.AA21137@pixel.convex.com>
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: HTML providers: please grab sgmls and the DTD
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 01 Dec 92 20:36:09 PST."
<9212020436.AA24215@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 92 20:42:24 CST
From: Dan Connolly <connolly@pixel.convex.com>
>Dan Connolly writes:
>> I noticed you've been diddling with the HTML files
>> on info.cern.ch -- quoted your attributes, dotted
>> your i's and crossed your t's, so to speak.
>>
>> But the files still don't fit into SGML.
>
>Can you expand on this a little more? Specifically what is he doing
>that isn't good?
I misspoke: the files he's generating are now to
the point where they can be described by some DTD,
just not the one I suggested.
Mostly he's added <HEADER> and <BODY> tags and quoted
his HREFs.
But, for example, he's still putting numbers in the
NAME attribute of anchors. I wanted to use SGML
ids, which are guaranteed to be distinct per
anchor (modulo case of letters). But they
must start with a letter.
You can change the DTD so that the NAME attribute
is a NUMBER or NMTOKEN, but then you lose the distinctness
guarantee (or you change it from an SGML construct
to an application convention.)
And adding the HEADER and BODY elements to the DTD
the way he's used them makes most of the HTML out there broken.
Dan