Since there exist the a push for HTML to be SGML compliant, It might
nice if HTML supported the SUBDOC feature of SGML. I believe SUBDOC
support will make it easier to maintain larger HTML documents with
muliple contributers. Now I'm not sure about the implementation
impacts on servers and clients if SUBDOC was officially supported by
HTML. I'm willing to here from others who are more experienced in such
matters.
On a related note, if SUBDOC support is too messy, or undesired, how
about allowing the HTML element to contain other HTML elements. I.e.
An HTML document may contain multiple HTML documents (an ugly sentence,
but you get my point). DocBook has such a declaration in its DTD. It
might seem strange, but it does have its uses.
Or to be less drastic, the content rule for the HTML element could be
changed to the following:
(((head,body)+),plaintext?)
This allows only a single HTML element, but one can have multiple
HEAD/BODY pairs in the document.
I believe this proposed content rule change would have little effect on
current WWW clients (and probably no effects on servers). Because of
the current lack of enforcing structure by clients, one can already do
the above with clients (like Mosaic and Lynx). The only problem is
that the clients cannot handle mulitple HEAD elements in the markup.
Currently, the clients will use only recognize the last HEAD element
defined.
Comments? Or is what I'm proposing so !@#$*& idiotic, that it should
not be mentioned again.
--ewh