Re: assorted HTML and SGML questions

Joe Wells (jbw@cs.bu.edu)
Sun, 19 Nov 1995 01:23:22 -0500


>>>>> "lee" == <lee@sq.com>
>>>>> "Dan" == Daniel W Connolly <connolly@beach.w3.org>

Joe> Q: (("text/html" Internet Media Type)) Does text/html forbid
Joe> including the SGML declaration (<!SGML ...>)? I know it forbids
Joe> including a document type declaration subset, but the standard is
Joe> unclear on whether the SGML declaration is allowed.

Dan> No. In fact, it requires it...

Dan> Well, you're the reader: if you say it's unclear, then it's unclear
Dan> :-) Sorry. But the info _is_ in there:

Dan> http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_3.html#SEC3.3
Dan> ==================================================================
Dan> HTML Public Text Identifiers

Dan> To identify information as an HTML document conforming to this
Dan> specification, each document must start with one of the following
Dan> document type declarations.

Dan> <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">

Dan> ...

I must be stupid, but I don't see the information in there. Perhaps you
mean that "must start with ..." implies that there can be nothing before
the document type declaration. Does that mean that the following is
illegal because the first thing is not a document type declaration?

<!-- document type declaration on next line -- >
<!doctype html public "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">

Joe> Q: ((HTML and Empty P Elements)) What are the semantics of an
Joe> empty P element in HTML? The standard doesn't really seem to
Joe> deal with this.

lee> If by an empty P you mean <P></P> then what do you want the RFC to
lee> say?

This is what I mean, except that it more commonly takes one of these
forms:

<p><p><p><p>

<p><hr>

<p><ul><li>text text<p><li>more text</ul>

-- 
Joe Wells <jbw@cs.bu.edu>