Re: Tables: what can go in a cell (part 2)

Jon_Bosak@Novell.COM
Wed, 8 Feb 95 12:55:35 EST

[James Mason]

> Although current HTML is nonhierarchical, I believe that it will need
> to evolve towards hierarchical models if it is to be able to deal with
> scientific and technical information, among other things. (In other
> words, I'd like to see <body> enforced as a container and would go
> even further to replace <h1>, <h2>, etc. with container elements that
> consist of a title followed by data that might include lower-level
> container element.)

But HTML is not heading that way. There is no sign of this evolution
in the HTML 3.0 draft and (as far as I can tell) no desire in the HTML
community to move in this direction. Enforcing containment would mean
a non-backward-compatible HTML, and no one seems to have the stomach
for this. People who want hierarchical structure can mark up their
documents according to some other DTD and serve them out in HTML (I'm
already doing this using DynaWeb) or they can wait a bit and use real
SGML browsers like Panorama.

Since HTML seems destined to be an authoring language for beginners
and a delivery language for the rest of us, I think that the emphasis
should be on simplicity and ease of implementation. I'm not sure yet
what elements have to be allowed in a table cell, but based on these
criteria I would favor the smallest set that we can get away with.

Jon

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