Christian Montoya wrote:
What were those early sentiments against specifying HTML as an SGML DTD?
Can anyone elaborate?
I know I'm only guessing here, but I think there were other proposals
for how HTML should have been implemented, XML DTD being one of them.
AFAIK, SGML won out because it was the easiest and most forgiving.
The majority of XML was developed in 1997 (released in '98) whereas the
HTML we're talking about was from 1992. XML wasn't even an option.
And as for the idea that SGML is more forgiving, well -- no. It's the
loose parsers with complex models that make it forgiving...
While the HTML form of HTML5 bears a close resemblance to SGML and
XML, it is a separate language with its own parsing rules.
Some earlier versions of HTML (in particular from HTML2 to HTML4) were
based on SGML and used SGML parsing rules. However, few (if any) web
browsers ever implemented true SGML parsing for HTML documents; the
only user agents to strictly handle HTML as an SGML application have
historically been validators. The resulting confusion — with
validators claiming documents to have one representation while widely
deployed Web browsers interoperably implemented a different
representation — has resulted in this version of HTML returning to a
non-SGML basis.
Authors interested in using SGML tools in their authoring pipeline are
encouraged to use the XML serialisation of HTML5 instead of the HTML
serialisation.
---
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/section-parsing.html
.Matthew Cruickshank
http://docvert.org/
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