Re: Obsolete elements -- trying again
"Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Aug 94 12:48:40 EDT
Message-id: <9408261649.AA28247@ulua.hal.com>
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From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-wg@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: Obsolete elements -- trying again
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
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[From what I can tell, your reply didn't get to Leo... he's
not on html-wg, as far as I know. He's at <RAMIA@stsci.edu>]
In message <9408261633.AA08887@curia.ucc.ie>, Peter Flynn writes:
>> I was wondering why XMP and LISTING are being made obsolete. They are
>> very useful when you want to return system error messages to the user
>> during the execution of a script. I can't use PRE because Lynx will get
>> confused when there is an unadorned "<".
XMP and LISTING are still in the DTD. They are not in the sections on
"how to write new documents," but they are in the "how to implement
a browser" sections. (I think.)
>> Is there any chance that the obsolete status of XMP and/or LISTING can
>> be changed?
>
>I was puzzled by this too: there are many times when you might want to
>include verbatim text explicitly lifted from an external source which
>may contain arbitrary ASCII or ISO 646 characters...
You can't stick arbitrary ASCII inside <XMP> or <LISTING>. If your
"arbitrary string" or "system error message" contains "/>" or "]]>"
then it can't be expressed using XMP or LISTING.
On the other hand, you _can_ put an arbitrary string inside <PRE>.
The characters '<', '>', and '&' may be represented as numeric
character references (& for &, e.g.) or entity references (&).
See the section on "special characters" in the HTML 2.0 spec:
ftp://halsoft.com/halsoft/olias/html-19940822/html/Entities.html
Dan