weibel@oclc.org:
|<HEAD> info should not be displayed. Here is a case in which the browser
|should be strict about what is accepted... if no assumption about a
|closed HEAD is made, then the document will not display, which should
|immediately become apparent to the author.
|
|The added side effect is that the community is protected in some small
|way from authors who do not test their documents ;-)
A case of deja vu: a long time ago, Mosaic had its own peculiar notion
of what an SGML comment looked liked and where it ended. After that
was fixed, suddenly a lot of documents appeared to be completely
blank!
But with respect to the maxim: "don't display data in the HEAD", I
don't see what's the problem. The DTD is not ambiguous, and if HTML
version 8.509 adds new elements, the document will be labeled as
"8.509", right?
The question is only: what is the most sensible heuristic in the
unlikely case that you find a syntax error and the two other
heuristics ("display nothing in HEAD" and "display everything in
BODY") are in conflict. OK, so let's recommend to UA writers: "in case
of ambiguity, use rule 1" (or rule 2, I don't care).
Bert
--
Bert Bos Alfa-informatica
<bert@let.rug.nl> Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
<http://www.let.rug.nl/~bert/> Postbus 716, NL-9700 AS GRONINGEN