HTML DTD question & comment

Kerry Burton (KERRY@novell.com)
Wed, 06 Dec 1995 18:08:47 -0700


I recently downloaded html.dtd, html-1.dtd, html-s.dtd and html-1s.dtd via
http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html-pubtext.html
I assume this is the "reference" set....

I have a question about the formal public identifiers for each of these
DTD subsets. The file html.dtd, for example, contains the declaration

<!ENTITY % HTML.Version
"-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"

-- Typical usage:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML//EN">
<html>
...
</html>
--
>

My question: Is the seeming inconsistency between the entity
replacement text and the comment intentional, or has the comment not
been updated, or what? I noticed that html-1.dtd uses the "2.0" version
of the public identifier to reference [I assume] html.dtd.

The long & short: can someone tell me whether I am OK trusting the
"HTML.Version" version of the PUBLIC id?

-----------

Also, a (picky) comment. The element PLAINTEXT is declared as:
<!ELEMENT PLAINTEXT - O %literal>
and the entity "literal" is declared as
<!ENTITY % literal "CDATA"
-- historical, non-conforming parsing mode where
the only markup signal is the end tag
in full
-->

In view of the comment, shouldn't both of PLAINTEXT's minimization
indicators be '-'?

Just curious,

Kerry Burton