Those DTDs have no more relevance than the HTML 3 DTD. The only
specification for what is and isn't legal we have from the people who
"proposed" the tags is a sample implementation (for which source isn't
available). This isn't something you can use if interoperability
actually means anything.
For instance, if you try feeding:
<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Foo</TITLE><CENTER>Centered Bar</CENTER></HEAD><BODY>...
to netscape, it quite happily centers "Centered Bar" at the top of the page. As far as I can tell, this means that CENTER is valid in the HEAD of a document. I'd like to know what <HTML><HEAD><CENTER><TITLE>Foo</TITLE></CENTER></HEAD><BODY>...
means, but nobody at netscape has bothered to answer my question, even to say "that has no meaning." Until NetScape publishes the rules, people trying to copy their implementation are playing the same game as MS-DOS cloners are: you have to copy every undocumented oddball behavior, and NetScape may turn that into a waste of time with their next release.
For a real-world example, NetScape quite happily swallows "xx xx xx" in it's coler body attributes. Emacs-w3 apparently doesn't like the spaces, meaning I wind up with the wonderful experience of white text on a just off-white page (I had to check it three times to verify that there was text there). The author of the page - who happened to be standing behind me when I viewd it - wasn't any happier about this than I was.
The really sad part about all this is that NetScape *can* produce documents that are usable as standards - they did a nice job with SSL. I won't speculate about their reasons for not doing the same for their HTML extensions.
> Wonderful! Would you care to constructively comment on the proposal I
> recently made regarding a content model change for <PRE>? It is very
> odd how I received not even *one* response from the wg either
> for *or* against my proposal to allow tables to be embedded in
> pre-formatted areas for the sake of backwards compatibility with HTML 2.0.
> Not even to say I needed to present a DTD fragment.
I'll second this sentiment. I've been trying to get some feedback - either positive or negative - on producing an I-D that covers the parts of HTML 3 that are current practice and not in any draft but the soon-to-expire HTML 3 draft. The solidest opinion I got was "This doesn't belong to the style group." <mike