5 ms·
As an astute reader, you rightfully criticize the use of <!DOCTYPE HTML [ ... <!ENTITY ICON6 SYSTEM "blah.."> ... ]> <HTM
by tannhaeuser 8y ago
As an astute reader, you rightfully criticize the use of
<!DOCTYPE HTML [
...
<!ENTITY ICON6
SYSTEM "blah..">
...
]>
<HTML>
...
&ICON6
</HTML>
which doesn't make sense as it declares and then references a parsed entity containing HTML.
Of course, what should've been used instead is an SGML data entity:
<!NOTATION GIF SYSTEM>
<!ENTITY ICON6
SYSTEM "blah.."
NDATA GIF>
Interestingly, the discussion also evolves around the anchor tag vs allowing href attributes everywhere to make any element work like a hyperlink, as MathML did. The decision to go with anchor tags complicates HTML to this day. HTML5 uses the (unproven) concept of "transparent content" to specify that the content model of <a> is inherited from the context where <a> is inserted [1].
Another interesting tidbit here is that <img> is modelled as SGML EMPTY element (HTML5 "void" element), a decision that would later complicate integration of XML/XHTML which doesn't support elements without end-element tags.
[1]: http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html#transparent-content http://sgmljs.net/docs/html5.html#transparent-content