I think I understand now how nested highlighting would be processed and
Murray makes a good point about the intent of highlighting (i.e. italics in
italics should really be plain).
I'd like to take this one step further. If I understand the present tagging
rules, the following example would be proper.
<B>text and more text and <B> and then some bolded text</B></B>
Before today, I would have said this is meaningless tagging and that the
internal set of B tags should be ignored. Now I have to ask, "Does this mean
the internal set of B tags should be presented as plain?"
Hopefully not. It would seem useful to distinguish highlighting over a
paragraph level font from the highlighting-on-highlighting case.
By the way, B is just used as an example. All highlighting tags appear to
defined this way. The DTD now says:
<!ELEMENT (%font;) --(%phrase.content)+>
where %font is defined as a member of %phrase.content.
This seem to say that B is allowed directly inside B. The HTML DTD
Reference, (pages 6.x), in fact reports it this way. Shouldn't the
definition somehow exclude the specific tag from appearing inside itself?
NOTE 1: I don't see a problem with an alternating sequence such as a B tag
inside an I tag inside a B tag. Just the B..B, CITE..CITE, etc. combinations.
NOTE 2: I really like the presentation format you use in the HTML DTD
Reference. This helps me a lot in understanding the rules in the DTD itself
which can be dense. (It was in the Reference that I noticed this feature of
B allowed in B, etc. which I am raising here.)
Stan Newton
Newton Computing Solutions