> The following is a simple proposal to show how HTML 3.0 could become a better
> SGML
> application and also a HyTime application.
> [...]
> The major changes concern a proper entity management. [...]
>
> You'll find in the proposed DTD that the IMG element
> still has the SRC attribute. But the SRC attribute is no
> longer a URL, it is an entity. You'll find the URL as the
> external identifier of the entit y when the entity is
> declared in the document type declaration. It means that
> there is a new indirection mechanism. Furthermore all the
> SRC attributes on other eleme nts like HR have been
> changed to ENTITY following the same mechanism.
Umm.... this might cause a *small* problem with
backwards compatibility.
Every existing HTML document with hyperlinks or inlined
images would have to be rewritten (that's only about 98,
maybe 99% of them), things like hotlists and link pages
would triple in size, and it would take twice as much work
to create a hyperlink with this scheme, but other than
that I don't see any problems. The extra robustness
gained by using one more level of indirection seems
worth the effort.
On a serious note, DeRose and Durand show how to
use aggloc and notloc to make HTML hyperlinks HyTime-
compliant in a way that's transparent to existing
documents.
The former HTML 3 'base=' attribute looked very much like
a way of building location ladders (what happened to that
attribute, by the way?).
--joe@trystero.art.com