Re: The META element

html-wg@oclc.org
Sun, 11 Sep 1994 18:43:06 -0600

The following message body is a retransmission of an earlier message to
www-html@info.cern.ch, from which I received no reply:
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I have a new assignment to develop authoring tools for HTML documents and
have been studying the July 94 draft of the HTML 2.0 specification. This is
an excellent draft overall but I do have several similar questions related
to tags allowed inside themselves.

The HTML DTD Reference (Level 2) states that BLOCKQUOTE tags are allowed in
BLOCKQUOTE tags (pg 6-2) but nesting of BLOCKQUOTEs and possible rendering
is not discussed. The HTML DTD (pg 5-5 & 5-7) defines BLOCKQUOTE as a member
of the %block Entity and defines the BLOCKQUOTE Element to contain
%body.content which includes %block. Is this intentional? Can I have
Blockquotes inside Blockquotes, that is, can Blockquotes be nested?

The HTML DTD Reference (Level 2) states for each of the Highlighting tags
(B, CITE, etc.) that the tags are allowed inside of themselves. See, for
example, Bold (pg 6-2). The HTML Level 1 DTD (pg 5-10) defines allowable
content for %font and %phrase elements in terms of a %phrase.content entity
definition which includes the %font and %phrase entity definitions, thereby
placing the tags inside themselves.

Shouldn't each of the Highlighting tags be allowed to include all
Highlighting tags EXCEPT ITSELF? Since the Highlighting for any specific tag
should already be on, the appearance of another tag with the same
Highlighting does nothing and has the potential to confuse some
viewers/processors.
Stan Newton
Newton Computing Solutions