Re: Comments on June 8 draft (long)

Joe English (joe@trystero.art.com)
Wed, 14 Jun 95 19:19:18 EDT

Daniel W. Connolly <connolly@beach.w3.org> wrote:

> In message <9506141838.AA00109@trystero.art.com>, Joe English writes:
> Yes. But I haven't submitted it because:
> 1. IETF guidelines say the TOC goes after Status and Abstract,
> 2. Convention says Terms goes right after Intro, not at
> the end.
>
> #1 is up to you.

I *could* hack the conversion script to put these
in the right order, but I was kind of hoping that
you'd do it by moving the <TOC> tag down a few
lines in 'html-spec.sgm' :-) 'twould save me some work...

(The SNAFU <PAPERFRONT> content model is an AND group,
so this should be legal...)

> >[ BTWII: I've been toying with a LaTeX filter too,
> > and have a (IMHO) nicer-looking PostScript version
> > partially ready; let me know if you're interested. ]
>
> Sure! What's the URL?

I'll upload that to CRL too. It'll be worthless for
official purposes -- right now it's missing the right
headers and footers, the public text isn't included,
all the cross-references are stubs, and there are some
problems with tabs in the <listing>s -- but other
than *that* I think it looks fairly nice ...

> >The "must"s here make "lynx -dump" and other HTML-to-plaintext
> >formatters nonconforming HTML user agents. Was this intended?
>
> Er... well... yes. There used to be a distinction between HTML level 0
> and level 1 for this, but it went away.

OK, fair enough.

> By the way: doesn't lynx
> do _em_ and *strong* ???

It used to. Sadly, it now uses termcap highlighting for
*everything*, in an attempt to preserve the visual formatting
I guess, but it makes everything much uglier than necessary.

> >6.4. Fragment Identifiers, p. 31, 2nd paragraph:

[ Re: case-sensitive matching of fragment identifiers ]

> > <A HREF="#foo"> ... <A NAME=foo>
> >will *only* work if HTML.Recommended is *off*. I've seen
> >lots of documents that use lowercase anchor names; are they
> >going to have forward-compatibility problems?
>
> Err... good catch. I'm changing the DTD -- getting rid of %linkName.
> When SGML IDs are introduced, the name of the attribute will
> change to ID.

But what about the case-sensitivity issue?
I'm presuming that URL fragment identifiers
are (or will be) able to address arbitrary SGML
IDs as well as named anchors; will they have
to be upper-case?

(Just checked with Lynx 2.3 Beta -- it appears to use
case-insensitive matching for fragment IDs, contrary
to the current spec. I'm on a VT100 today, so I can't
test anything else; could someone else try?)

> By the way... Roy Fielding suggested getting rid of the METHODS
> attribute of the A and LINK element. I'm game for it. In fact,
> I can imagine getting rid of URN and TITLE too. Any thoughts?

I think TITLE is worth keeping.

I wouldn't be sad to see METHODs go, and URN won't be worth much
until the URI-WG comes up with something, but I'd be reluctant
to make any changes that could invalidate existing documents
this late in the game.

> 4.306 start-tag: Descriptive markup that identifies
> the start of an element and specifies its generic
> identifier and attributes.

Ah, good.

--Joe English

joe@art.com