My thanks go to Nick Arnett for pointing out the only currently working
hypertext archive of the www-html mailing list, at
<URL:http://asearch.mccmedia.com/www-html/>. I followed various links to
4 other archive sites (including the one at EIT I mentioned earlier) and
none of the others were currently working. Some of them had stopped
archiving more than a year ago.
Changing subjects, during this brief search I was somewhat depressed by
the bad HTML I found at all of these sites. I would like to think that
authors of HTML-generating software (like mailing list hypertext archives)
would be aware of the standard, but there is a lot of stuff that gets
written because it happens to work with some browser. For example, at the
URL above is this line (broken into multiple lines for readability):
<ul>View by: <b>DATE</b>
- <a href="replies.html"><b>REPLY COUNT</b></a>
- <a href="subject.html"><b>SUBJECT</b></a>
<a href="search.html"><p><b>SEARCH THIS LIST</b></a><p>
My web browser gives 23 error messages about this single line, because
everything between the <UL> and the first <LI> is illegal. The <P> tag
inside the A element is even worse. My web browser doesn't display any of
this. I'm thinking about changing it to pretend it saw an <LI> if it sees
illegal data in this context. This is horribly contrary to the SGML
standard, because the LI element's start-tag may not be omitted. It's
even worse in HTML 3.0 because, even if the start-tag could be omitted,
the parser could be expecting a LH element instead and I don't think SGML
allows inferring a start-tag in that case. Oh, well. :-(
-- Joe Wells <jbw@cs.bu.edu>