Re: XSL formatting objects to HTML

[Paul Prescod <papresco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chris Lilley wrote:
> 
> XML does not have these restrictions because there is no hard-coded
> processing of the elements. Also, it is much easier to generate a
> consistent parse tree from XML than from an SGML application (no omited
> start or end tags, etc) and for consistent presentation of CSS- (or
> indeed of XSL-) styled documents, a consistent parse tree is essential.

It isn't really true that it is hard to parse SGML-based HTML. In fact, it
is very easy, with or without an SGML parser -- substantially easier than
parsing XML (no general text entities, for example). If browsers cannot
properly and consistently parse valid HTML, then there is no real excuse
for it.

The real problem is that the de facto definition of HTML is very different
from the de jure definition, and the de facto definition is *brutal* to
parse reliably. But that shouldn't affect their support of real HTML
(though it probably does).

 Paul Prescod  - http://itrc.uwaterloo.ca/~papresco

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