I hate to take up your as I realize you are probably quite busy (esp. if
you get lots of questions from people like me). In any case I wanted to ask
you about an apparent inconsistancy with the HTML Level 2 DTD.
In particular, in
http://www.hal.com/products/sw/olias/Build-html/7L9WSWBuWpF84aK.html the text
states (pardon the formatting):
The empty <plaintext> tag terminates the HTML entity. What follows is not
SGML. Instead, an old HTTP convention specified
that what followed was an ASCII (MIME "text/plain") body.
For example:
<PRE>
<plaintext>
<BR>0001 This is line one of a ling listing
<BR>0002 file from <any@host.inc.com> which is sent
</PRE>
The <plaintext> tag allows the rest of a file to be read efficiently without
parsing. Its presence is an optimization. There is no closing tag. The rest
of the data is not in SGML.
The above implys that no HTML parsing is done so the <BR> and </PRE> markers
should not be interpreted. However, in file
http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-spec/L2index.html the Level 2 DTD
description states:
PLAINTEXT
Required Parts
<PLAINTEXT>characters...
All Parts
<PLAINTEXT>characters...
</PLAINTEXT>
Allowed In Content Of...
<HTML>
This implys that the PLAINTEXT marker can be used w/in the HTML scope and
that it has an optional end marker. This seems to be inconsistant with the
first description. While this is not from the "prefered" DTD, it is
confusing (at least to me).
What I would like to know is, just how should the <PLAINTEXT> marker be
grok'd? Should it be treated as a marker that means "Do no more HTML parsing
from now on" no matter what or should it be treated much like the <XMP>
marker except that it may or may not have an end marker?? I would appreciate
it if you could clear this up for me. Thanks
Bruce
INet: Bruce_Kahn@iris.com