Re: color: NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, and HTML3

Ka-Ping Yee ([email protected])
Fri, 21 Jul 1995 13:08:18 -0400

On Fri, 21 Jul 1995, Michael Johnson wrote:
> Perhaps I should have been more explicit. The following:
>
> <img alt="> some text <">
>
> is, according to [1], a valid construct. However, my parser will look at
> this and assume that it's more likely to be an erroneously unclosed literal
> inside of a tag than a literal that happens to contain '<'.
>
> I deliberately chose to do it this way because people rarely (probably never)
> use '>' and '<' in literals, but they often forget to close literals, thanks
> to the brain-dead parsers in Mosaic and Netscape.

But does that mean your parser should be equally brain-dead? What you have
done may well make it impossible for people to use the '<' and '>' characters
within attribute values -- a painful and irrational restriction.

> I do something similar in a case like this:
>
> <a href="http://foo.bar.org/" <img alt="some text"></a>
>
> When I see this, I assume that the author omitted the trailing '>' on the
> anchor tag. I flag this as a lexical syntax error and implicitly insert the
> missing '>' character.

Someone correct me if this is wrong, but i believe this behaviour is
actually SGML-compliant. Isn't < one of the ways to implicitly end
a tag while starting another one?

Ping (Ka-Ping Yee): 2B Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Canada
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