Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 10/05/06 19:58

Scripsit Harlan Messinger:

> What I meant was, was it a joke to label something, in a
> specification, as obsolete or deprecated when there had never been a
> previous version of the specification in which it could have been
> included as a living, breathing component.

No, including <XMP> in the HTML 2.0 specification was not meant to be a
joke. It was just a mistake, but you can read the reasoning behind it in the
spec itself. HTML 2.0 aimed at standardizing existing practice (and so did
HTML 3.2 later), and to cope with that, it included <XMP> without really
defining it consistently _and_ it said it should not be used. (There are two
descriptions of how <XMP> content should be parsed, and the one that is
normative is not how browsers worked and work, whereas the one described in
a note and in a DTD comment is not describable in SGML.)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

[Back to original message]