> * Hypertext structure. How do you like the glossary?
> Are the links sprinkled throughout too much noise?
Having each and every occurence of a gloss word made into a link does
give a rather busy effect. However, as one cannot assume that people
have read the pages in a given order or indeed that they started reading
at the top of a page, the normal printed document conventions do not
aply.
My feeling is that the increase in precision is probably worth the
sub-optimal aesthetics. It does mean that other links becomne a little
buried, however.
> But I'm most concerned with the first three sections right now:
> HTML as an Application of SGML
> Hence the terminals above parse as:
> HTML
> |
> \-HEAD, BODY
> | |
> \-TITLE \-P
> | |
> | \-<P>,"Some text. ",EM
> | |
> | \-<EM>,"*wow*",</EM>
> \-<TITLE>,"Parsing Example",</TITLE>
Given certain historical problems with P, I would be happier if the
first occurence of P in an example in the standard showed a closing P tag
somewhere. Either in the example document or in the parse tree.
Yes, I am aware that the closing </p> can be omitted. But as the parse
tree shows HEAD and BODY being inferred, could it not show </P>, </BODY>
and </HTML> being inferred as well? Just to make the point early on?
> The syntax character set for all HTML documents is ISO-646-IRV.
The word syntax is not a link, so the term 'syntax character set' does
not seem to be defined. It would aid clarity if it were.
> Note that the terminating semicolon is only necessary when the character
> following the reference would otherwise be recognized as markup:
True, but perhaps this should say a little more strongly that the
trailing ; is not actually wrong, just that it can be omitted in this
instance if you really want.
(Qouting from the HTML version)
> <P>
> To include comments in an <A HREF="html-spec_12.html#GLOSS11">
> HTML document</A> that will be eliminated in
> the mapping to terminals, surround them with <SAMP>`'</SAMP>. After
> the comment delimiter, all text up to the next
> occurrence of <SAMP>`-->'</SAMP> is ignored.
Should that be
... surround them with <SAMP>`<!--'</SAMP> ... ?
In the example HTML document,
> <IMG SRC ="triangle.xbm" alt="Warning:">
> Be sure to read these <b>bold instructions</b>.
Could that be changed to
<IMG SRC ="triangle.xbm" alt="Warning: ">
> Be sure to read these <b>bold instructions</b>
ie a trailing space after Warning:
> Version
> To help avoid future compatibility problems, the version parameter may
> be used to give the version number of the specification to which the
> document conforms.
If omitted, what does it default to? The current highest version number that
has been standardised?
> Charset
> The charset parameter (as defined in section 7.1.1 of RFC 1521[MIME])
> may be given to specify the character encoding scheme used to
> represent the HTML document as a sequence of octets.
Again it would be helpful to say explicitly what happens when this is omitted
(assume ISO Latin1?)
> HTML user agents must support the ISO-8859-1 character encoding scheme,
> and hence the US-ASCII character encoding scheme. (9)
I feel you should either use ASCII or ISO-646-IRV throughout (and have a
footnote explaining the relationship between the two).
Lastly, I should say that my overall feeling from reading the spec is that it
seems rather stiff and impenetrable, even when you understand what it is talking
about. I would compare the language used to an ISO standard, which you may take
as a compliment or not according to preference ;-)
-- Chris Lilley, Technical Author +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Manchester and North HPC Training & Education Centre | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Computer Graphics Unit, Email: Chris.Lilley@mcc.ac.uk | | Manchester Computing Centre, Voice: +44 61 275 6045 | | Oxford Road, Manchester, UK. Fax: +44 61 275 6040 | | M13 9PL BioMOO: ChrisL | | URI: http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/staff/lilley/lilley.html | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | "The first W in WWW will not wait." François Yergeau | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+