On 8/21/23 00:59, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote:
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.
From the specifications, what you say may be true. But there has been a widespread expectation of hierarchy in HTML since the mid-1990s at least.
For example it may have always been okay to write:
<b>here is some bold text<i>here is some bold-italic
text</b>here is some italic text</i>
and I recall that some earlier browsers permitted that. But I
also recall that results were inconsistent, and some things tried
to "clean up" such HTML.
Keith
