Re: WYSIWYG . . . <update>

by "Joshua Graham" <jagraham(at)ozemail.com.au>

Date:	Thu, 25 Mar 1999 11:45:55 +1000
To:	<hwg-software(at)mail.hwg.org>
	todo: View Thread, Original

>The pages I write don't validate against W3C's validator. They validate
>against the criteria that I require -- well-written HTML with proper
>opening and closing tags and no illegal embedded markup.

This is called "well-formed" HTML.

There are two levels of conformance for documents using an SGML language
under the WebSGML Adaptations annex: valid and well-formed.

Well-formed documents can be used without a DTD, but they must follow some
simple rules, which basically come down to the document (paraphrased from
the XML recommendation):

1) Having one or more elements.
2) Having exactly one element, called the root or document element, no part
of which appears in the content of any other element [this is <HTML> in
HTML]. For all other elements, if the start-tag is in the content of another
element, the end-tag is in the content of the same element. More simply
stated, the elements, delimited by start- and end-tags, nest properly within
each other.

There are 10 other constraints that define a document as being
"well-formed".

The additional requirements for a "valid" document are more complex and
quite difficult to include whilst parsing and generating. Adhering to the
well-formedness constraints is hard enough.

As we know, some tools can't even generate well-formed documents, let alone
valid documents. The latest generation of tools do a good job.

With XML beginning to enter production sites, these tools will be held
accountable even more. We can expect to see WYSIWYG (or as I prefer to call
them YAFINYGGI [You Asked For It Now You're Gonna Get It] for that is what
they really are at the moment) web application tools which get better and
better at creating pages without the hand-tuning of a markup expert.

Also, parsers will get better at dealing with the markup and an extensive
amount of work has gone into XML and other WebSGML-based languages over the
past couple of years.

<BRIGHT>The near future</BRIGHT>.

Josh.
Graham Information Science Pty Ltd
jagraham(at)ozemail.com.au

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