home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Tony Johnson writes:
-
- > Excellent! One area I would like to see clearly documented is what types of
- > nesting of tags is legal, I have not found it clearly documented in the
- > existing HTML documentation (of course maybe I didn't follow the right link).
-
- > For example, which of the following are legal/supported/encouraged HTML??
-
- > <a href=x>The <h1>Link</h1></a>
- > <a href=x>The <b>link</b></a>
- > <b><i><e>Weird</e></i></b> etc. etc. etc....
-
- The current DTD specifies that anchor text is PCDATA. This perhaps too strong
- as it rules out ANY tags occurring between <A> and the </A>. The same is true
- for the tags: <EM>, <TT>, <STRONG>, <B>, <I>, <U>, <CODE>, <SAMP>, <KBD>,
- <VAR>, <DFN> and <CITE>.
-
- The DTD also gives limitations on which tags can occur within lists - namely
- the preceding tags, together with <LI> and <P>, but *no* nested lists.
-
- I have a feeling that most people find the SGML DTD rather hard to follow
- in detail. Goldfarb's account of SGML almost seems to go out of its way
- to make life difficult for the newcomer. Perhaps we need to supplement the
- HTML DTD with a more accessible BNF style description.
-
- > Of course one answer is that browsers should do their best with whatever they
- > get....but I think in the interest of portability (and of something that works
- > fine with ine browser working equally well with another one) it would be better
- > to document what things are required to be supported.
-
- An easy to understand, yet precise description of the core HTML is needed.
- I feel we would also benefit from some guidelines for dealing with bad HTML,
- and pointers to experimental extensions.
-
- > It would also be useful for browsers to have a -noextentensions flag
- > (or some moral equivalent) under which they flag anything other than the
- > strictly supported constructs to aid people in writing portable HTML.
-
- My first browser did this - but I got fed up with all the error messages!
- Perhaps the browser should just report the document as not conforming
- to the core spec and leave it to a separate program to generate a full report.
-
- Regards,
-
- Dave Raggett
-
-