From: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer)
> Actually, having just "<" is legal SGML.
As if it were reasonable to expect a browser to swallow legal HTML.
Many have problems if you just fail to omit all the tags.
I'd be interested in any browser that properly displayed all of
http://www.phone.net/~mwm/browserbuster.html . It validates under the
11/15 HTML 2.0 DTD, even with HTML.Recommended turned on. I've as yet
to find a browser that can deal with the second paragraph in it
properly.
> With all that said, one should use the ';' to delimit entity
> references. It makes life easier for developers of HTML based
> applications.
It also makes it more likely that your documents will display
properly.
<mike
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This is what sgmls set at recommended (strict) has to say about
http://www.phone.net/~mwm/browserbuster.html :
sgmls: Error at -, line 1 in declaration parameter 4:
Could not find external document type "HTML"
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 3 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 4 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 4 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 5 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 6 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 7 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 7 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 9 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 9 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 9 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 10 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 10 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 10 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 12 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 12 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 14 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 14 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 14 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 15 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 16 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 17 at "<":
Invalid character(s) ignored; attempting to resume
DOCTYPE subset
sgmls: SGML error at -, line 19 at record end:
Document ended invalidly within prolog; parsing ended
What am I missing here? Certainly a return like the above would cause
me to rework the document.
As far as I can tell, most documents on the Web can't pass the current
DTD, not to mention when sgmls is set to ``recommended.'' And this
certainly goes for documents prepared using an HTML authoring editor.
Seems kinda sad, and most of the docs that do not pass can be easily
fixed without changing the page appearance, so perhaps the problem lies
either in carelessness or ignorance. It does seem, though, that most
writers of HTML docs really don't care as long as the page looks okay
in Mosaic and NetScape.
Fred