Re: Are standards a bad or good thing?

-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Tom Polk <jtpolk(at)camalott.com>
To: Kynn Bartlett <kynn-hwg(at)idyllmtn.com>
Cc: hwg-theory(at)mail.hwg.org <hwg-theory(at)mail.hwg.org>
Date: zondag 11 oktober 1998 23:17
Subject: Re: Are standards a bad or good thing?


>When somone is opining about validation, they usually are not speaking of
it in
>the generic sense.  Heck, everyone that I know of at least validates a page
in
>the sense that it works in the browser that they use, so in a sense,
everyone
>already validates.  They may validate against one, two, three or more
browsers
>(which takes time), but they are validating.


Ah, no. There is a very clear definiiton of what "validating" means and what
it is and "testing a page in a certain browser" is not it [0].

>The quandry is against what do we validate. In many instances we talk about
>HTML 4.0 as something monolithic, and it most emphatically is not. The
>differences between HTML 4.0 Strict and Transitional OR Frameset are
significant
>enought to actually be talking about two different types of HTML. Whole
>categories of elements are eliminated in 4.0 Strict.


The term is language, not "type of HTML". HTML 4.0 STRICT is a language,
HTML 4.0 TRANSITIONAL is another (even though the one is a subset of the
other).

[0] To "validate" is a different name for constructing a derivation tree for
a given sentence in a language, based on the formal grammar of that
language.

Ben Z. Tels
optimusb(at)stack.nl
http://www.stack.nl/~optimusb/
UIN:2474460

"The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but one cannot stay in the cradle
forever."
                                        --Tsiolkovsky

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