From: Eric Armstrong <eric.armstrong@eng.sun.com>
Jeff Miller wrote:
> While I agree that html does not meet our needs. I don't think that a
> conversion tool is out of the question as most people I know that hand
> code
> html document do so without use of <p><h3>wwww</h3> wierdness that you
> were
> talking about and composer style editors generate know styles. (Of
> course,
> it's only as good as the user at the keyboard). In, lets pick a
> number,
> 80% of html out there could be converted with a conversion tool and
> then
> cleaned up. Leaving the miss interpreted and plain ugly for the luckly
>
> human.
I understand that most people don't. I don't, which is why those cases
never
occurred to me. But the program you write has to be prepared for a
number
of eventualities. Basically, you can't depend on finding an </h3> as a
terminator.
So you have to figure out what to do if you see <h2>, <h1>, <h4>, <h5>,
<table>, or one of the other possible terminators. (I'm not really
certain that
h3 doesn't require a terminator, but I know that a <dd> entry, for
example,
can be terminated by </dd>, <dt>, <dd>, or </dl>.) As the number of
possible
combinations goes up, program complexity rises dramatically -- a
situation that
is no doubt responsible for xml's insistence that every element be
terminated.
When you see <p>...<h3>, for example, you could simply assume that the
<h3> starts a new header. Right? But what do you do when </p> *is*
present, as in <p>...<h3>...</h3>...</p>? Do you simply ignore the </p>?
Do you throw an error that says the document is not well constructed? Or
do you convert the h3 to a font tag? Ignoring the </p> seems like the
simplest
course, but then where do you put the text, and how does it relate to
what
comes after?
The problems are solvable -- all problems are. As a matter of
engineering,
though, does it make sense to pour a lot of time and energy into solving
them, or does it make more sense to skip forward one generation and take
advantage of the structuring that XML provides?
If XML does *not* become the lingua franca of the Web, it would seem
that solving the HTML problems would be worthwhile. But if it *does*
become the standard, then solving HTML's problems is so much wasted
energy.
My crystal ball is dusty. How's yours?
:_)
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