Re: HTML 2.0 editing status
Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>
Date: Sat, 3 Sep 94 10:49:36 EDT
Message-id: <199409031449.HAA06296@rock>
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From: Terry Allen <terry@ora.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <html-wg@oclc.org>
Subject: Re: HTML 2.0 editing status
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I agree with your priorities and proposed schedule. I've just
been playing around with the DTDs and HTML version of the 22 August
spec (fetched from ftp://ftp.cix.org/pub/WWW/ ) and have found
a couple things that bother me.
The DTDs don't parse together without generating errors
about duplication. This may be unavoidable given the structure
involved, and they're really warnings rather than errors,
but it will be unsettling to many. It would be much nicer
if no errors or warnings were generated; I'd almost prefer
3 DTDs, at least for the final cut.
I can't find any place in the doc that explains how the
DTDs are linked to each other (though I can see plainly in the
DTDs how this is done): this ought to be described.
That place would be a good place to describe the "duplicate"
errors.
The DTDs are named html-0, html-1, and plain html. The last
ought to be html-2, shouldn't it?
I'd like further discussion (unless there's already consensus
among the rest of the group) on the "Proposed" and "Obsolete"
marked-section entities. Seems to me that if we're documenting current
practice (approximately) we can't very well mark anything
Obsolete, and that Proposed elements don't belong in these
DTDs. Eliminating these entities would also reduce the
number of errors reported due to redefinitions and nesting
of marked-section entity definitions. Use of what are
now "Obsolete" elements could merely be deprecated in the
text.
I don't understand why the DTDs are included as
text in the HTML (each line beginning with <BR>). Why not
link to the *actual DTDs* and avoid any chance that the
real DTDs and the HTMLized DTDs will differ?
Finally, the doc is so chunked that it is needlessly difficult
to navigate. This may be a religious issue, so I don't expect a
change, but I would *very much* like to have also a flat list of
nodes in the order in which they may be concatenated to produce
a linear document (that is, the order in which they are assembled
to produce the .ps output). Is HTML_TOC.html that list?
--
Terry Allen (terry@ora.com) Editor, Digital Media Group
O'Reilly & Associates, Inc. Sebastopol, Calif., 95472