Vendors taking SGML seriously

Amanda Walker (amanda@intercon.com)
Wed, 12 Apr 95 11:13:21 EDT

Arthur van Hoff wrote:
> Not as far as I'm concerned. Most HTML product vendors don't take the SGML
> standard seriously, probably because most web info providers are not much
> concerned with document interchange, structure driven search, etc.

I think this is an oversimplification. We were repeatedly pounded on during
the test cycle for our HTML browser because we wrote it according to the
HTML 2.0 draft spec and SGML. As a result, we failed to duplicate the bugs
that permeate other browsers, and were told "we don't care if it's legal or
not, every other browser handles it just fine and yours should too." We've
had to add specific code to our parser to duplicate specific common HTML/SGML
parsing bugs in order to be able to convince people that our browser isn't
broken (and we still get bug reports that amount to "page X is displayed
wrong--I checked in both Netscape and Mosaic!").

We're probably going to go the route of Arena and put up a big red
"ILLEGAL HTML" sign whenever we hit something, and maybe offer to pop up
a bug report form detailing exactly where and how the page is illegal.

I think you'll see vendors starting to enforce strict SGML compliance just
as soon as the WWW community at large decides it's a feature instead of a bug.
We can get away with taking a stronger stance than some vendors because we
don't make all our money off of HTML software, but even we have to be
pragmatists or we lose sales and reputation. We spent about twice as much
time getting our parser to swallow common illegal HTML than we did getting
it up and running on legal content.

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation