Re: META

Terry Allen (terry@ora.com)
Thu, 29 Jun 95 18:15:14 EDT

Glenn:
| From: "Terry Allen" <terry@ora.com>
| Date: Thu, 29 Jun 1995 14:11:32 -0700
|
| | I don't agree. First, a document containing an internal subset is not
| | currently unconformant. Therefore UAs should be prepared to deal with
| | internal subsets now. The question is how much.
|
| I'd be happy if they did. But it would be a very large change.
|
| For some folks perhaps.

Such as NCSA, Netscape, probably most of those folks and their users.
Tell us how much the Stonehand browser costs.

| | We can establish an HTML application convention that sanctions the
| | interpretation of only certain declarations and ignores others.
|
| Yes, I agree that in principle we can. However, your example
|
| <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN" [
| <!NOTATION MyNotation PUBLIC "-//MyOrg//NOTATION MyNotation//EN">
| <!ENTITY MyRandomData SYSTEM "http://foo.com/random.dat"
| NDATA MyNotation>
| <!ENTITY MyPCData SYSTEM "http://foo.com/pcdata.htm">
| ]>
|
| suggests that the convention would be "attend to notation and entity
| declarations, but ignore element declarations."
|
| I don't have any SGML tools that will do that (so far as I know),
| but at the moment I can vet all my docs with my SGML tools. I don't
| want that to change.
|
| I'm not talking about making SGML tools more restrictive, but making HTML
| UAs more inclusive w.r.t. SGML.
|
| I have to confess that it is relatively easy for me to call for this
| approach since our (Stonehand) HTML Viewer employs an SGML-based parser
| which does support internal subsets but which has been made somewhat more
| restrictive in the sense that it does not permit the declaration or
| redeclaration of element types, attribute lists, shortrefs, linktypes,
| etc. [If it encounters one of these, it ignores it and emits a warning.]
| What it does support is full use of notation and general entity declarations.

Because I don't have a tool like that, your approach is unacceptable to me.

| I therefore don't think it unreasonable to propose the use of external
| entity declarations to accomplish the desired goal of data inclusion.

I can't agree that it's reasonable to say that because you have a tool that
can do the odd thing you propose (and when much more minimal changes will do),
everyone else should have to develop tools that emulate this odd function.
You'll recall that the point of the notation approach is only to associate
scheme info with META contents; that can be done perfectly well within
the (limited but still unfilled) frame of SGML functionality now expected
of browsers.

Regards,

-- 
Terry Allen  (terry@ora.com)   O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.
Editor, Digital Media Group    101 Morris St.
			       Sebastopol, Calif., 95472


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