Garrett A. Wollman
Philip Greenspun's Homepage : Community member
A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since January 26, 1998
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- April 6, 1998, on Learn to Program HTML in 21 Minutes :
To expand a little bit on the discussion:
HTML is an application of SGML. SGML is good.
Part of the definition of HTML (in SGML) specifies:
MINIMIZE
OMITTAG YES
SHORTTAG YES
In SGML-speak, this specifies two useful features.
First, any tag which could be deduced from the
structure of the document may be omitted. This
includes not only , but also ,
,
, and many others. The second feature,
SHORTTAG, allows markup to be expressed more
concisely, e.g., Shortened
End Tags for Fun and Profit>.
Unfortunately, since very few Web browsers
actually implement HTML as is it formally defined,
these features cannot be relied upon. However,
it is a Simple Matter of Programming to combine
existing SGML tools with `make' and a copy of the
HTML DTD to automatically process Web documents
through an SGML normalizer which transforms HTML
into a common subset understood by all browsers.
At the same time, other advanced SGML feat...
- April 14, 1998, on Communications:
You describe MPEG-2 as ``better than a VCR but
not HDTV''. Sorry to disappoint, but HDTV
(more correctly called DTV or ATV) *is* MPEG-2.
The TV broadcasters are finally figuring out that
there's a lot more money to be made in delivering
five streams of slightly-better-than-NTSC than
there is in delivering one stream of
quite-a-lot-better-than-NTSC.
philg@mit.edu