Re: HTML/EML implementation

• Mail folder: WWW Talk Jan 94-present
• Next message: Pei Y. Wei: "Re: A thought on implementation..."
• Previous message: burchard@geom.umn.edu: "Yikes! What happened to "image" INPUTs?"

Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Date: Thu, 17 Feb 1994 17:22:50 --100
Message-id: <9402171605.AA08714@ulua.hal.com>
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: connolly@hal.com
Originator: www-talk@info.cern.ch
Sender: www-talk@www0.cern.ch
Precedence: bulk
From: "Daniel W. Connolly" <connolly@hal.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: HTML/EML implementation 
X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas
Content-Length: 1285

In message <199402171514.AA24107@rock.west.ora.com>, Terry Allen writes:
>(Context:  Dan Connolly proposed some simplifications to the use
>of SGML on the Web, which I opposed.)
>
>What it comes down to is that you want to make your job easier
>by eliminating some of the basic functionality of SGML.  There
>is no way of doing this in the HTML DTD.  You are advocating  
>another ML, call it EML for "expedient."
>
>But HTML-conformant docs won't necessarily parse through your client,
>e.g., if they have comments in them.  (What will you do about those?
>render them as normal text?)  My problem is that 
>all the other tools I have will tell me that such docs are valid.
>To make this work, I'd have to take my SGML docs and preprocess
>them, then check to see that they're valid according to your EML.
>

This business of author-validation is a compelling counter-argument
that I only fully considered after I had posted my idea.

I certainly detect a sincere commitment to SGML on the part of
information providers. Now... we just need freely distributable,
_correct_, efficient, reusable implementations in C, perl, and
elisp... That's what constitues a net.standard, I'd say. Hmmm...  I
guess we'd better decide on a DTD (or set of architectural forms...)
pretty soon!

Dan