On Sun, Aug 20, 2023 at 8:59 PM Keith Moore <moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
3. Part of the problem may be that, even before the introduction of
HTML, there was a widespread assumption that SGML-like syntax should be
used for markup. SGML and its descendants have a fundamental flaw in
that they expect text to be tree-structured, organized in a hierarchy
like chapters, sections, paragraphs, and so on. This might be mostly
harmless for documents that evolve linearly and have a small set of
editors. But collaborative technical discussion over email isn't like
that at all.
That is not true at all. SGML is a pile of puke, XML removed some of the inanities. But the markup does not have to be tree structured, that is an XML2RFC peculiarity.
Until the <div> tag was added, there was no way to express structure in HTML, which became an issue trying to apply style sheets.
<h1> is just a paragraph tag, so are <p> and <pre>. The notion of hierarchy comes from the interpretation of the tags. So a valid HTML document is
<h1>Heading</h1>
<p>blah</p>
<p>blah</p>
<h2>Heading</h2>
<p>blah</p>
<p>blah</p>
There is no nesting of the sections as XML2RFC does (or at least so I remember, it is years since I looked at the output from my toolset, I edit in Word with markdown examples.
