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HTML to the max: a manifesto for adding SGML intelligence to the World-Wide Web

1995; Elsevier BV; Volume: 28; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/0169-7552(95)00100-0

1879-2324

C. M. Sperberg‐McQueen, Robert F. Goldstein,

Web Applications and Data Management

HTML demonstrates that SGML markup is useful for networked information. How can it be made even more useful? One way is to extend the tag set from HTML to HTML2, etc. We argue here for a more radical approach: full SGML awareness in WWW. We believe the difficulties are small, the cost affordable, and the advantages overwhelming. SGML is a metalanguage for defining markup languages; HTML is just one instance of this infinite family. At present, documents in other SGML document types must be translated into HTML for display by a Mosaic client—sometimes this imposes unacceptable information loss. WWW browsers could handle other SGML document types without translation by launching a general-purpose SGML browser to view them, as they now launch graphics viewers; a better solution overall would be to build SGML display into the WWW browsers themselves. Either way, display of an SGML document would be controlled by a style sheet using a small number of display primitives (“bold”, “line break”, etc.) to specify the rendition of each element type. For “well-known” document type definitions (DTDs) like HTML, style sheets could be distributed with the browser, or built in. For other DTDs, the browser would fetch a style sheet from the server. Using style sheets, browser software can also make it easy to customize document display. DTDs and style sheets can be designed to accommodate extensions, ensuring that authors can make small extensions to the tag set with no change whatsoever in the target browsers and virtually no performance penalty.