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Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 18:16:40 --100
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From: Rich Wiggins <WIGGINS@msu.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
Subject: Re: your mail
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>I agree that installing sgmls is not an option for most people, except
>the few that know enough about SGML. But the suggestion by somebody
>that browsers do not ignore markup errors, but report them (in a
>friendly way, of course), could be an alternative. In my "vision" of
>the future many, if not most documents will be multi-purpose, and that
>means that people will simply have to write (correct) SGML.

Absolutely.  In the real world, there will be a variety of uses of
documents, and a variety of humans writing HTML in a variety of ways.
Many authors will probably start with existing HTML documents as templates.
Their most familiar tool will be their Web browser of choice. It is
unrealistic to expect hundreds of thousands (or millions) of document
authors to  install and learn an SGML tool.

If we assume that most users of the Web are readers, not authors, then
it may make sense for browsers to do the best they can with bad HTML,
and not issue error messages.  But that just says the default should
be that behavior; there's no reason why there couldn't be an option
that turns on error reporting.

/Rich Wiggins, CWIS Coordinator, Michigan State U