Pierre Lewis recently said:
> With waivering faith I wrote:
> :-)
>
> > HTML certainly is an interesting alternative to plain text because it
> > is so universal (and, hopefully, with a stable foundation). And it
> > allows to include illustrations, annotations, &c.
>
> Coincidently, I was reading last nite (ironically, in "iX", a German
> magazine) about XML (eXtensible Markup Language) which, says the
> article, could replace (in the mid term) HTML as the lingua franca of
> the Web. So much for that idea...
>
> Es lebe plain text! (long live ~)
And what about the Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML)? This has been
around for ages. It lets you define a set of markup tags and then use them.
HTML is a particular set of SGML tags and the SGML definition of HTML (the DTD)
is available from W3. If you are writing text in HTML I would strongly recommend
that you put a DTD version declaration at the top. e.g.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"> which is English with HTML 3.2
markup. Then syntax check the HTML with a SGML parser to make sure it conforms.
Finally keep a copy of the DTD somewhere safe along with a copy of the matching
HTML standard so that future generations can always understand your text. (The
copy of 3.2 that I have is about 12K in size.)
You might want a copy of the SGML standard too - I don't know where to get a
machine readable copy from.
Tim
-- Tim Partridge. Any opinions expressed are mine only and not those of my employer
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