Re: Newbie encoding query

Passin, Tom wrote:
> >From the DTD in the HTML 4.01 Rec -
> 
> <!ELEMENT HEAD O O (%head.content;) +(%head.misc;) -- document head -->
> <!ELEMENT TITLE - - (#PCDATA) -(%head.misc;) -- document title -->
> <!ELEMENT HTML O O (%html.content;)    -- document root element -->
> <!ELEMENT BODY O O (%block;|SCRIPT)+ +(INS|DEL) -- document body -->
> 
> Very clear, right?  Those tags are optional.  Aren't you glad you don't
> have to design the parser?

Heh. OK, I was wrong.

However, the prose in section 7.1 says

  An HTML 4 document is composed of three parts:

  1. a line containing HTML version information, 
  2. a declarative header section (delimited by the HEAD element), 
  3. a body, which contains the document's actual content. The body may be 
     implemented by the BODY element or the FRAMESET element. 

  White space (spaces, newlines, tabs, and comments) may appear before or 
  after each section. Sections 2 and 3 should be delimited by the HTML 
  element.

I see we're back in the should/may/must discussion, but at the very least
it sounds like HEAD is not optional, based on that prose, and it sounds like 
one of either BODY or FRAMESET are required.

Of course, a bit further down, it says that that head tags are not required. 
Perhaps in HTML there is such a thing as an implicit (tagless) element? :)

Anyway...

Mike

-- 
  Mike J. Brown   |  http://skew.org/~mike/resume/
  Denver, CO, USA |  http://skew.org/xml/

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