Re: The Reference Concrete Syntax is not Current Practice (Was Re:

amanda@intercon.com
Tue, 26 Sep 95 02:47:30 EDT
> I doubt that they're happy. Ask Amanda. More importantly, look at what
> they're doing, or have already done. The cost has already been passed on.
> Ask Amanda again.

Yeah, "happy" is not the applicable word. I believe that "spitting nails"
was more accurate when I started seeing what kind of stuff "parsed OK in
*other* browsers".

That being said, I don't think that SGML is dead on the WWW yet. Nothing
on the internet is cast in stone if you make its replacement "cool" enough
(i.e., offering a large enough benefit to offset the cost of migration).
If newer WWW interfaces (such as Netscape 2.0, HotJava, or whatever) are
more picky about syntax, it provides incentive to upgrade the content.
After all, it's not the big document repositories that are the source
of bad HTML--it's the text files edited by hand to put some small company
"up on the web" or somebody's vanity page. If someone has to add closing
quotes in their HREFs so that they can have embedded looping animation
applets with MIDI accompaniament, they'll do it. If Netscape has shown us
nothing else about the popularization of the WWW, it's that if you give
people new toys, they will play with them.

And, as Netscape is evidently discovering, it's easier to build new
toys with a more structured parsing engine :).

Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation