NetNews Offline 2/NetNews Offline Volume 2.iso/news/comp/sys/amiga/misc-part2/11311

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From: [e-mail] (Jonathan Gapen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: Announce: AWeb 1.0 released!
Date: 7 Apr 1996 23:04:22 GMT
Organization: esCom Amiga Madison Enthusiast's Organisation
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Joseph Waldvogel) writes:
>
> I know AWEB is NEW, hasn't been around long.  But come on,  Do you see WEB
> Browsers comming out on OTHER systems, now that only support HTML 2 ONLY?
> There ALL trying to be at least as good as Netscape.  AWEB is like not even
> trying.

   LOL!
   There's something out there called Standard Generalized Markup Language,
which is a language which offers great flexibility within a well-defined
stardard, because it is a language to define markup languages.  HTML is
properly an "SGML application" in that there is a publically maintained SGML
Document Type Definition (DTD) for HTML 2.0, which is the latest _standard_
for HTML, by the way.
   The International Standards Organization adopted SGML as standard number
8879 in 1986, and it has been widely adopted in science and industry because
of its extreme flexibility.  The American National Standards Institute has
also adopted SGML as a standard, though I can't remember the reference number,
offhand.  The reason for this is because SGML is a structure-based language,
it leaves all formatting up to a particular application program.  That makes
document exchange easy, doing away with all the incompatible, and often
proprietary, word-processor formats.
   (If you're interested in understanding more about SGML, I've got the URL of
a very good introduction to SGML.)
   Saying "at least as good as Netscape" does make me laugh.  "Netscape HTML"
or NHTML violates SGML rules in that it moves far beyond document structure,
trying to add all manner of formatting commands.  It wouldn't be as bad, if
they'd put out their own DTD for NHTML, and then *follow*it*.
   The big problem is that Netscape didn't even try to implement a good SGML
parser in Navigator/Mozilla/Netscape.  (I say they didn't try, because if they
did, I'd have to call them... *gasp*  Microsoft programmers.)  Navigator
accepts all manner of terrible HTML.  Improperly nested tags, capitalized
entities, improper SGML comments, multiple TITLE tags anywhere in a document
(they did fix the bug which allowed people to do scrolling titles), and
improperly terminated tag values.
   You may be thinking, "So?  It looks good!"  Obviously, then, you're not a
blind user who has to put up with garbled Web pages that come out
unintelligible, because the speaking browser can't deal with all the badly
done HTML.  The programmer of the speaking browser would have to emulate
Netscape's bugs very closely to get it right.  And you're not stuck at a
smaller college with a shell account for Internet access, running Lynx, so you
don't have to see how garbled pages get, because people rely on Netscape's
bugs to make their poor HTML look good.
   Don't slam AWeb simply for following the rules.  It implements HTML 2.0
almost perfectly, so whose fault is it if the Web page you load isn't HTML?
Certainly not Yvon Rozijn!  That AWeb follows the rules is a good thing, as
the Netscape fiasco indicates.  Unfortunately, they have a huge marketshare, so
as their browser got buggier and buggier, HTML went by the wayside, and
interoperability went down the tubes.
   All those distorted and MIA Web pages in AWeb should show you just how bad
it has become, how Netscape has started to destroy the Web.

--
Jonathan Gapen ([e-mail])
Bread in, toast out. How does it DO that?