Re: The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Simple Hypertext DTD

John Cowan (cowan@locke.ccil.org)
Fri, 05 Jun 1998 14:48:36 -0400


Tim Bray wrote:

> Nice work; a couple of comments:

Thank you. Praise from Sir Roger is praise indeed.

> 1. Why do you have the (barf) FONT element in the days of stylesheets?

I would rather have had CONTRAST (different text color), IMPORTANT
(bigger font), and UNIMPORTANT (smaller font) tags, but nobody added
such generic local markup to HTML 4.0. I have added some comments.

Michael Everson, BTW, says that red color is a plaintext element in
Egyptian hieroglyphics and Naxi texts (from China), and someday Unicode
may well get control characters for BEGIN RUBRIC and END RUBRIC,
to be rendered as a long overhead line in B/W environments.
See http://wwwold.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n1636/n1636.htm .

I note that ABBR and ACRONYM did get into HTML 4.0, and I am
adding them to ibtwsh.dtd forthwith.

> 2. The html character entities that you reference unfortunately are
> non-XML-conformant, because they are all declared like so:
>
> <!ENTITY copy CDATA "&#169;" -- copyright sign, U+00A9 ISOnum -->
> There are two obvious problems here... -Tim

Um, yes. Somebody someday will have to fix that. For now, the
intent is clear, and nsgmls does not enforce the prohibition even
when running in XML mode.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org
	You tollerday donsk?  N.  You tolkatiff scowegian?  Nn.
	You spigotty anglease?  Nnn.  You phonio saxo?  Nnnn.
		Clear all so!  'Tis a Jute.... (Finnegans Wake 16.5)