On Wed, Jul 08, 1998 at 03:11:43PM -0400, Paul Reavis wrote:
> "Stephen J. Carpenter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> sez:
> >for some things ie <P> you can omit the close tag....for <LI>, <TABLE>
> >etc you really NEED the close tag
>
> Well, I appreciate your advice but please don't teach your grandpa to
> chew cheese :-)
>
> There are some tags which require closing - <table> is certainly one, as
> are the <hX> tags, <b>, etc. There are some which do not - <p>, <li>,
> even parts of table like <td>. All can be inferred from context by human
> or machine; even really stinky old browsers from four years ago deal
> fine without them (assuming they even supported the tags, certainly not
> true for tables etc.).
This is not only logical but even conform to the SGML definition of HTML, as
can be easily proofed by the standard dtd files:
/usr/lib/sgml/html-3.dtd:
<!ELEMENT LI - O %flow; -- list item -->
/usr/lib/sgml/dtd/html-4.0-loose.dtd
<!ELEMENT LI - O (%flow;)* -- list item -->
^ start tag must be present
^ end tag is "o"missible.
Paul, I would suggest you try "psgml"'s sgml mode, it does a better job,
makes your documents comply to html/sgml standard and knows what a DTD is
and how to parse it. It is probably more clever than your html mode.
Marcus
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