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Re: Root element specified by DTD ?

From: "Alan J. Flavell" <flavell@-------.---.--.-->
To: NULL
Date: 6/3/2006 10:38:00 AM

On Sat, 3 Jun 2006, Joe Kesselman wrote:

> In other words:

Who and what are you trying to restate?  Your header says it's 
<UH8gg.662$Uw6.49@r...> by Jukka, but readers have 
no idea which part(s) of that posting you are trying to comment, on, 
contradict, misquote, or whatever.  Please observe customary usenet 
courtesies.

> As always, a DTD -- or a schema -- is only a partial
> description of what makes a document correct and meaningful.

The W3C HTML specification requires the document root to be the <html> 
element.  That seems to me to be a syntactic constraint on anything 
which lays claim to being an "HTML document" (as opposed to a 
fragment).  Which is part of what Jukka said, and which you appear to 
be trying to obfuscate.

> Think of these as "higher-level syntax checking"; the application is 
> always going to impose semantic constraints as well.

Of course; but your comment, far from being a restatement "in other 
words" of the article you were following-up to, appears to be some 
quite unrelated issue, that throws little or no light on what Jukka 
said.  By failing to quote the relevant parts on which you are 
commenting, you give the unfortunate impression that you are making it 
harder for readers to see just how the reasoning is being de-railed.

> Having the schema or DTD describes the document's structure in a 
> machine-readable form that tools can take advantage of, so they 
> don't have to do *all* the checking themselves. That's valuable. But 
> don't expect it to be complete.

It seems to me that you could do well to distinguish between an "HTML 
document", and an HTML fragment.  The kind of HTML fragment under 
discussion here is not (IMO) an "HTML document" within the meaning of 
the applicable specifications, and that is on syntactic grounds.

Jukka is going a bit far at the point where he says:

|the HTML 4.01 specification requires that one of three specific 
|DOCTYPE declarations be used ...

- since this would appear to rule out ISO HTML as being a bona fide 
kind of HTML, quite apart from the various custom DTD which are 
around, and which I think most folks would accept as *kinds* of HTML 
document, albeit not approved by the W3C.

But the main argument does not hinge on that detail, as far as I can 
tell. Their root element (express or implied) needs to be <html> 
before they can be an "HTML document".

h t h


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