To: www-talk@info.cern.ch From: "Daniel W. Connolly" Date: Wed, 06 Apr 1994 21:28:53 CDT Subject: Come 'n Get it: A DTD for current practice in HTML Ok. I did it. I grabbed a bunch of HTML files from all over creation (NCSA, CERN, Leeds, U Hawaii, etc.), and ran them all through sgmls with the same DTD. The results are pretty raw, but the DTD is at: http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-test/html.dtd and the whole shootin match is at: http://www.hal.com/%7Econnolly/html-test/ I had to tweak the docs a little, but mostly, when in doubt, I tweaked the DTD. I did find quite a few "coding errors" (i.e. missing or extra tags, HREF spelled HERF). I'd like to take the diffs from the draft-iiir-html-01.txt version of the DTD and enumerate them, but I pretty much rewrote the DTD, so diff won't tell me much. But from memory: * I changed OMITTAG to YES in the title

header

... parses the same as title

header

... which is pretty much current practice anyway. * I also changed LI, DT, and DD from EMPTY to being containers with omitted end tags. I think this is the way people see it. * But I left

as EMPTY. The problem is not just changing all the markup that's out there, but changing the tutorials, conversion tools, etc. Soon, I'd like to change

to being a container, but not until the folks that write tutorials and converters sign up to support the change. And even then, perhaps a better strategy would be to introduce a new element name .. and retire

altogether. It's bad to change the meaning of a widely-bound symbol. * I changed SHORTTAG to YES to support

and