Re: Toward Closure on HTML

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@hal.com)
Tue, 05 Apr 1994 14:05:20 -0500


In message <199404051846.AA10419@willow.tc.cornell.edu>, Jim Davis writes:
> As you observe, people don't use an SGML parser
>to validate their documents. There is no reason to think then that
>they will ever start. That's reality.

No, That's cinicism.

The vast majority of computer users don't even know what a text editor
is. They don't write programs: they use them. They know what MS Word
is. They use applications to capture their documents.

>> .. That people use text editors to generate it is an artifact.
>
>Same thing. If this is what people do NOW, what is the evidence
>they will ever change?

How about some 20 articles/week on comp.infosystems.www about RTF2HTML
tools?

>To summarize: People will continue to write in HTML without
>the assistance of tools and validators.
>
>If you want people to start using format HTML, I think you need
>to show how this will provide real benefit TO THE AUTHOR, who
>is the one who must do the work to install and use the checker.

I hope to see a day when it will be more valuable to spend time
validating a document with an SGML parser than testing it by hand with
different browser implementations, because the implementations will be
too numerous to make it feasible, but they will each conform to the
DTD. Call me a dreamer. :-}

Dan