Re: HTML+ Comments

Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
From: Dave_Raggett <dsr@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
Message-id: <9307191000.AA01252@manuel.hpl.hp.com>
Subject: Re: HTML+ Comments
To: henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu
Date: Mon, 19 Jul 93 10:59:57 BST
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Mailer: Elm [revision: 66.36.1.1]
Status: RO

> (How come I have this dreaded feeling im about to be flamed? :)

Because "its late" and your wife is going to give you hell when you get home :-)

Seriously though, thanks for commenting on the spec.

> 1) The specification allows </> to be a valid end tag for all tag's.  I feel
> this is a mistake as it leades to great ambiguity when the document is bein
> parsed automatically, or being read by a human.

SGML tags act like brackets and must be properly nested. There is therefore
no syntactic ambiguity. However, in the real world, people do make typos and
you are right in suggesting that this abbreviation would make it harder for
browsers (and people) to recover from errors.

Before I remove this feature, does anyone else feel the same way?

> 2) It appears that both the <img> and <fig> tag should be rolled into one,
> as both accomplishes esentially the same thing.

I have included IMG for two reasons.

    a)  for simple captionless graphics, which are positioned
        as part of the current text line.

    b)  for backwards compatibility with HTML (X Mosaic and Cello)

> 3) Physical styles should remain seperate tag's as they are currently
> implemented in HTML.  (I.e <b> instead of <em b>).  The <em> tag should
> refer exclusivly to logical role's, and not physical styles.

The single tag mechanism was adopted to solve the issue of a proliferation
of emphasis tags. Everyone has different ideas on the appropriate set, and
I felt that we needed a mechanism that didn't freeze in today's prejudices.

Physical styles are hints to the browser, and independent of the logical
role of emphasis. I forsee browsers ascribing particular styles to certain
roles which override the hints. It didn't seem worth keeping <b>, <i> and <u>
given that the others had been removed.

Cheers,

Dave Raggett