That makes sense. Although the objections to expanding on SGML
syntax make sense to me intellectually, I get a real screaming
horror at the idea of describing HTML in terms of a standard whose
definition is not as freely available as an RFC or IETF draft. If
we want to encourage people to write conforming clients, we must
make the standard (or at least the implementation guidelines) as
straightforward as possible. Otherwise, people won't bother and
will get it all wrong.
So where do I find the RFC or IETF Draft on C? or Fortran? or COBOL?
Tim is quite right, it would be wonderful if the ISO climbed back
aboard the planet and made the specs available free, so people could
actually _use_ them. It would also be wonderful if someone would write
sufficient of an implementor's spec and place it in the public domain.
I guess it's just unfortunate that SGML didn't grow out of the
Internet :-)
///Peter