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Re: What is Tag Soup?

• To: <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: What is Tag Soup?
• From: Arjun Ray <aray@n...>
• Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 19:32:19 +0000
• In-reply-to: <5.1.0.14.0.20021011103629.0393bfd8@p...>
• References: <SQA7NIPJQQO611YTOKGPO63IFE9D43.3da65847@MChamp> <014e01c27131$47045e40$33a1dc40@murphy> <5.1.0.14.0.20021011103629.0393bfd8@p...>

"G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@C...> wrote:
| At 2002-10-11 07:19 -0700, Dave Winer wrote:

|> What is Tag Soup?

Start with the generally underacknowledged truth - perhaps because it's so
embarassing - that people learn from and adapt to their software, and the
prevalence of Tag Soup "out there" is explained by what popular software
has made possible, not by some supposed predilection to sloppiness on the
part of Joe Homepager.

| I have used this term in my instruction for years to characterize the 
| jumble of angle brackets acting like tags in HTML in pages that are 
| accepted by browsers. 

This is a good "technical" definition - the pointy-bracket ersatz markup
apparently accepted by browsers in the Mosaic tradition - but Tag Soup
actually goes beyond that.  Tag Soup is also a mindset or mentality which
the observable behavior of browsers supports and encourages - for the
simple reason that the browser implementors themselves had precisely this
idea of markup.  It has been all downhill since then. 

 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Dec/0010.html
 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Dec/0044.html
 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/1999Dec/0050.html

(Hmm, Jelks is right that Google shows me as the first user of the term on
Usenet - but I certainly didn't invent it!  "Tag salad" was another term,
of basically the same import, that I remember also had some currency.) 

• References:
  • The Knights of Tag Soup (was Re: RE: evolvable formats )
    • From: Mike Champion <mc@x...>
  • What is Tag Soup? (was Re: The Knights of Tag Soup (was Re: RE: evolvable formats ))
    • From: "Dave Winer" <dave@u...>
  • Re: What is Tag Soup?
    • From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@C...>

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