Re: The Reference Concrete Syntax is not Current Practice (Was Re: Standards, Work Groups, and RealiThe Reference Concrete Syntax is not Current Practice (Was Re: Standards, Work Groups, and Reali

Daniel W. Connolly (connolly@beach.w3.org)
Wed, 27 Sep 95 01:07:30 EDT
In message <Pine.3.89.9509262028.A23946-0100000@alpha>, Arjun Ray writes:
>
>3. Lexical, e.g. the notorious missing quote and arbitrary COM balancing
>in comment declarations. Here, the lexically correct piece of markup is
>*itself* in doubt. But how is the tokenization *failure* registered? This
>is where the Concrete Syntax comes in -- or so we would hope.
>
>You are grieviously misled if you believe that the lexical behavior of the
>Mosaic family of browsers to be an instance of error recovery -- that there
>is some supplementary "smart" heuristic at work on top of a "basic"
>Concrete Syntax implementation. For that to be true, it must be true that
>all legal input is tokenized correctly. And that is manifestly *not* the
>case.

Well-said.

> (a) It's text until STAGO, ETAGO, or MDO.
> (b) After STAGO/ETAGO/MDO, immediately scan forward for the first
> occurence of '>'. Designate that as TAGC/MDC, and copy everything
> in between (that was passed over in this scan) to a buffer.
> (c) Tokenize buffer for GI, attributes and values.
> (d) Goto (a)

Bingo! This is the World's Most Lucid Mosaic-2.4-HTML Spec! :-)

>I find inexplicable -- and distressing -- the reluctance of the Working
>Group to confront this issue, especially the significance of HTMLparse.c.

Huh? I think we addressed it pretty clearly in HTML 2.0. Mosaic 2.4
has some bugs. Most of them are called out explicitly as notes in the
spec. For the right answer, you gotta follow the SGML spec. What's
left to confront?

>So, I'll try once more: Can the Working Group offer an explanation why
>HTMLparse.c should be considered a conforming implementation of the
>Refrence Concrete Syntax as it applies to HTML?

Nope. I'm not about to defend such a fallacy. Where did you get the
idea we would/should?

Dan